On Tuesday, Hunter Biden filed a lawsuit against Rudy Giuliani, alleging the former lawyer for President Trump violated his privacy rights by illegally circulating content from Biden’s infamous laptop.
The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, saying Giuliani is “primarily responsible” for the “total annihilation” of Hunter Biden’s digital privacy. It also names a former federal prosecutor, Robert Costello, who represented Giuliani previously as a defendant.
“For the past many months and even years, Defendants have dedicated an extraordinary amount of time and energy toward looking for, hacking into, tampering with, manipulating, copying, disseminating, and general obsessing over data that they were given that was taken or stolen from Plaintiff’s devices or storage platforms, including what Defendants claim to have obtained from Plaintiff’s alleged ‘laptop’ computer,” wrote Biden’s attorneys in the complaint, claiming the data wasn’t even from a “laptop,” but instead from an “external drive.”
The “external drive’s” contents include videos, pictures, emails, and other data that, since their first publication in 2020 by the New York Post, have caused political problems for his father, President Biden, and placed him in legal jeopardy.
Costello and Giuliani have openly acknowledged that they obtained copies of files from a hard drive device that Hunter Biden allegedly left at a Delaware computer repair shop in 2019. Rudy Giuliani provided that information to the Post in October 2020, which published a story based on the emails of Hunter Biden that implicated President Biden in a business deal with a Ukrainian company that he had hired Hunter on its board.
House GOP members have launched an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden based on claims that he used his position. As vice president, to dissuade Ukrainian prosecutors from investigating the company that his son worked for. Republican lawmakers further allege that based on their follow-up probes, the president was involved in several business deals arranged by his son Hunter.
The president repeatedly denied any involvement in his son’s business involvement
Hunter Biden’s lawyers previously issued cease-and-desist letters to Giuliani and others who obtained and then disseminated the laptop’s contents.
The lawsuit seeks an order by the court to prevent Giuliani and others from accessing, manipulating, tampering with, or copying Biden’s data and have them return the “device/hard drive” to Hunter Biden, along with any cloud files, backup files, or copies of the same data.
The filing of the lawsuit Tuesday is the most recent effort from the younger Biden and his lawyers to hit back after leaks of the information catapulted his shameful private life to the headlines of many conservative media outlets.
Earlier in the month, the president’s son sued former President Trump aide Garrett Ziegler, alleging Ziegler and his company spread “tens of thousands of emails, thousands of photos, and dozens of videos and recordings” considered “pornographic” from the device.
In March, Hunter Biden initiated a countersuit that asserted the Wilmington, Delaware, owner of a computer repair shop, John Paul Mac Isaac, had unlawfully disseminated the younger Biden’s personal information and leveled charges against him of six invasions of privacy.
Mac Isaac first filed a lawsuit against Hunter Biden — as well as Politico, CNN, and Democrat Representative Adam Schiff of California — for defamation in October 2022.
According to Mac Isaac, the president’s son didn’t return for the laptop within three months after he dropped it off, and he could not be reached. Then, he alerted the FBI after seeing emails illustrating information about then-Vice President Joe Biden’s alleged foreign business dealings and videos of Hunter Biden performing sex acts with prostitutes and taking drugs.
Before the federal agent retrieved the device, Mac Isaac made a copy of its hard drive and gave it to Giuliani the following year.
In July, Biden was expected to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax counts of willful failure to pay federal income tax as a portion of the plea deal to avoid jailing on a felony gun charge. Instead, he pleaded not guilty to one felony gun charge and two misdemeanor tax charges last month.
