Hunter Biden sued former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani on Tuesday in a Los Angeles federal court, claiming “hacking” was involved in Giuliani obtaining his “Laptop from Hell,” which he abandoned at a Delaware computer store.
“Defendants are among those who have been primarily responsible for what has been described as the ‘total annihilation’ of Plaintiff’s digital privacy,” Biden’s lawsuit says. “They also are among those who have been primarily responsible for the ‘total annihilation’ of Plaintiff’s data.”
Hunter Biden claims Giuliani and his longtime lawyer, Robert Costello, improperly accessed the laptop’s data by “hacking into, tampering with, manipulating, copying, disseminating, and generally obsessing over data that they were given that was taken or stolen from Plaintiff’s devices or storage platforms.”
Hunter Biden filed a civil lawsuit today against Rudy Giuliani and his longtime lawyer Robert Costello.
— The Recount (@therecount) September 26, 2023
Biden claims they caused “total annihilation” of his digital privacy, and violated federal and state computer privacy laws through their alleged efforts to hack his devices. pic.twitter.com/S6bUfqmb9m
Hunter Biden, in 2019, while addicted to crack, left his abandoned “Laptop from Hell” at John Paul Mac Isaac’s Delaware computer repair shop. The FBI soon visited the shop to collect the laptop, but Mac Isaac had a copy of the hard drive. While the FBI took control of the laptop, the data was conveyed to Giuliani and ultimately to the New York Post, CNBC reported:
Giuliani delivered information allegedly gleaned from Biden’s laptop to the New York Post, a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., in October 2020, a month before the election between Trump and Joe Biden.
The Post then published a story based on that data, which suggested that President Biden may have attended a meeting with a representative of a Ukrainian company that employed Hunter.
Claims that Joe Biden was involved in his son’s allegedly corrupt business dealings, which are in part based on information from the laptop, are the focus of an impeachment inquiry into the Democratic president by GOP-run House committees.
An exterior view of “The Mac Shop” in Wilmington, Delaware is seen on October 21, 2020. (ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images)
At the time of publication, the Post included copies of the FBI’s subpoena for the laptop to Mac Isaac. The Post also included a contract signed by Hunter Biden, saying if he did not pay for the repair service and pick up his computer after 90 days, his computer would be considered abandoned.
As many as 15 media personalities claimed Hunter’s laptop emails were likely “Russian disinformation.” Many media outlets cited Politico’s now-infamous article that reported 51 intelligence officials’ belief the laptop was “Russian disinformation,” which was also used as a basis to censor the Post’s reporting on social media. That claim proved false.Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted in 2022 that the FBI warned Facebook of an imminent “dump” of “Russian propaganda” shortly before the New York Post broke the “Laptop from Hell” story, causing the article to be shared less on the platform to a “meaningful” degree. Twitter also infamously censored the story.
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Senate Judiciary CommitteeSeventy-nine percent of Americans believe Trump would have won reelection in 2020 if Hunter’s laptop had been known to voters, according to a Technometrica Institute of Policy and Politics poll.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.
