Hunter Biden on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, his consulting companies, and one other attorney for allegedly “looking for, hacking into, tampering with, manipulating, copying, disseminating, and generally obsessing over” private data that was taken from the first son’s infamous laptop computer.
The president’s son is accusing Giuliani and others “for the past many months and even years” of engaging in computer fraud and violating data access related to his laptop that was left at a repair shop in Delaware. Giuliani’s former lawyer Robert Costello is also listed as a defendant in the lawsuit, which was newly filed in a Los Angeles federal court.
“Defendants are among those who have been primarily responsible for what has been described as the ‘total annihilation’ of Plaintiff’s digital privacy,” the suit reads. “They also are among those who have been primarily responsible for the ‘total annihilation’ of Plaintiff’s data.”
It further alleges the data was intentionally “manipulated, altered, and damaged” before being sent to Giuliani and Costello and that the extent of “further alterations and damage to the data” is currently unknown to Hunter Biden.
“This is not an admission by Plaintiff that [Delaware computer repair shop owner] John Paul Mac Isaac (or others) in fact possessed any particular laptop containing electronically stored data belonging to Plaintiff,” the lawsuit states in a footnote. “Rather, Plaintiff simply acknowledges that at some point, Mac Isaac obtained electronically stored data, some of which belonged to Plaintiff.”
In response to the filing of the lawsuit, Giuliani spokesperson Ted Goodman told National Review: “Hunter Biden has previously refused to admit ownership of the laptop. I’m not surprised he’s now falsely claiming his laptop hard drive was manipulated by Mayor Giuliani, considering the sordid material and potential evidence of crimes on that thing.”
The contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop have been criticized by Republican lawmakers after the New York Post published the first story on it in October 2020. At the time, the news outlet reported on the computer’s private emails that stated then-vice president Joe Biden met with a representative of Burisma that placed his son on the Ukrainian energy company’s board.
Giuliani was reportedly involved in delivering the information to the news outlet after the owner of the Delaware repair shop gave a copy of the hard drive to Costello before turning it over to the FBI in 2019.
Since then, Hunter Biden’s lawyers have evaded the question of whether the laptop and its contents personally belonged to him or whether they were even legitimate. His attorneys and 51 former intelligence officials first discredited the laptop origin story and Giuliani by claiming both were tied to Russian disinformation.
However, it was revealed in July an FBI official told Twitter at the time that the New York Post story was real and not Russian disinformation. Still, the social-media company initially suppressed the story at the behest of the FBI.
The younger Biden currently faces ongoing legal troubles and criminal probes as public scrutiny grows against his father’s re-election next year.
Earlier this month, Hunter Biden was indicted on three federal gun charges for lying on a federal firearms form and possessing a handgun while under the influence of narcotics or other controlled substances. It remains to be seen whether he will be charged with additional tax evasion charges after pleading not guilty to the misdemeanor counts this summer.
On Thursday, the House Oversight Committee will hold the first hearing of the president’s impeachment inquiry, giving Republican congressmen a national platform to present key evidence into the Biden family’s alleged influence-peddling schemes and foreign business dealings.