Hunter Sues Rudy Giuliani
Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, has taken legal action against Rudy Giuliani, the former personal lawyer to former President Donald Trump. In a lawsuit filed on Tuesday, Biden accuses Giuliani of violating his privacy rights by illegally sharing content from his infamous laptop. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, also names Robert Costello, a former federal prosecutor and Giuliani's previous lawyer, as a defendant.
According to the complaint, Giuliani is "primarily responsible" for the "total annihilation" of Biden's digital privacy. The lawsuit alleges that the former lawyer and Costello dedicated an "extraordinary amount of time and energy" towards obtaining and disseminating data from Biden's devices. This includes information from what Giuliani claims to be a laptop but is in fact from an external drive.
The contents of this external drive allegedly include pictures, videos, emails, and other data that have caused political problems for President Biden since their initial publication by the New York Post in 2020. Giuliani and Costello have openly admitted to obtaining copies of files from a hard drive that Biden allegedly left at a Delaware computer repair shop in 2019. The former lawyer provided this information to the Post, leading to a story that implicated President Biden in a business deal involving a Ukrainian company that had hired Hunter Biden as a board member.
Biden's lawyers also claim that the former lawyer and his team have attempted to manipulate the data on the laptop's hard drive. They have previously issued cease-and-desist letters to Giuliani and others who obtained and disseminated the laptop's contents. The lawsuit seeks a court order to prevent Giuliani and others from accessing, tampering with, manipulating, or copying Biden's data, and to have them return the device and any backups or copies of the information.
This is not the first legal action Biden has taken in response to the leaks of information from his laptop. Earlier this month, he filed a lawsuit against former Trump aide Garrett Ziegler, alleging that Ziegler and his company spread "tens of thousands of emails, thousands of photos, and dozens of videos and recordings" from the device. In March, Biden initiated a countersuit against the owner of the computer repair shop, John Paul Mac Isaac, for unlawfully disseminating personal information and invading his privacy.
Mac Isaac first filed a lawsuit against Biden, as well as CNN, Politico, and Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., in October 2020 for defamation. He claimed that Biden did not return for the laptop within three months after dropping it off, and he could not contact him. In turn, Mac Isaac alerted the FBI after seeing emails and videos that suggested possible foreign business dealings and drug and sex acts involving Biden.
Biden had previously been expected to plead guilty to charges of tax evasion and a felony gun charge in July. However, he ultimately pleaded not guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and one felony gun charge in August.
Biden's attorneys did not respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit filed on Tuesday. However, this legal action further highlights the ongoing legal battles surrounding the leaks from Biden's laptop and the impact it has had on his family and their privacy rights.