Hunter Biden sues Rudy Giuliani for “the total annihilation” of his digital privacy

Hunter Biden, son of the president of the United States, Joe Biden, after a hearing at the courts in Wilmington (Delaware), last July.JONATHAN ERNST (REUTERS)

Hunter Biden, son of the president of the United States, Joe Biden, faces in court against Rudy Giuliani, henchman of the previous president, Donald Trump. The famous laptop forgotten in a repair shop in Wilmington (Delaware) regains prominence. Hunter Biden accuses Giuliani of “the total annihilation” of his digital privacy for illegally accessing and disseminating its content in a lawsuit filed this Tuesday in the California courts.

The lawsuit accuses Giuliani and attorney Robert Costello of “hacking, manipulating, copying, disseminating, and generally obsessing over data provided to them that was taken or stolen from plaintiff’s devices or storage platforms, including which the defendants claim to have obtained from the plaintiff’s alleged laptop.”

In the final stretch of the 2020 election campaign, the appearance of the contents of Biden’s laptop aspired to become the October surprise that would change the sign of the electoral result. Her computer contained thousands of photographs, including some with sordid sexual content, and private messages. From one of the old messages it was deduced that Joe Biden, when he was vice president, was going to accompany his son to a dinner where there would be partners from his business in Ukraine.

The formal investigation as a preliminary step to a possible impeachment against the president ordered by the president of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, is based in part on those messages, which did not demonstrate Joe Biden’s involvement in the businesses of your son. The first appearances of that investigation are scheduled for this Thursday.

At a time when he was hooked on alcohol and drugs (a consequence, he maintains, of the death of his brother Beau), Hunter Biden forgot to pick up his laptop. A copy of it ended up in the hands of Giuliani and Costello and then on the front page of the New York Post. The lawsuit calls into question the veracity of some of the contents of the laptop that have been revealed. It claims that the data was “manipulated, altered and damaged” before being copied and sent to the former mayor of New York and that the “illegal hacking and manipulation” of Giuliani and Costello led to “new alterations and damage to the data.”

The lawsuit accuses both attorneys and several of their companies of violating, among others, the federal computer fraud and abuse law and various regulations in California, where Hunter Biden resides.

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“Plaintiff has demanded that defendants Giuliani and Costello cease their illegal activities with respect to Plaintiff’s data and return any data in their possession that belongs to Plaintiff, but they have refused to do so. “Defendants’ statements suggest that their unlawful hacking activities continue today and, unless terminated, will continue into the future, making this action necessary,” the brief alleges.

The lawsuit recounts how the owner of the repair shop, John Paul Mac Isaac, made several copies of the laptop on external hard drives. He sent one such copy to Costello’s home in New York, where he accessed the data: “By booting and logging into an external drive that contained plaintiff’s data and using plaintiff’s username (… ), Costello illegally accessed, manipulated and altered plaintiff’s data in violation of federal and state law,” the text states. The accusation also extends to Giuliani and his companies and records the times in which the defendants publicly acknowledged being in possession of Hunter Biden’s data.

“While the defendants and their allies are entitled to their unfounded opinions about Plaintiff and the Biden family—and are also free to share those opinions on their podcasts and with anyone else who cares about what they have to say—they are not entitled to violate federal and state anti-hacking laws to further their personal and political agendas. However, that is precisely what they have been doing with impunity, and what they will continue to do if there is no judicial relief,” says the lawsuit, in which Hunter Biden requests a jury trial and asks that Giuliani and Costello be convicted. to pay compensatory and punitive damages, among other measures.

Hunter Biden already filed a lawsuit in March against the owner of the Wilmington repair store. In parallel, he sued the tax agency last week for publicly revealing data about his taxes that he, in his opinion, should have kept secret. Two agency employees told Congress that they believed his tax returns were not being properly investigated.

The president’s son has been indicted on three counts in connection with the alleged illegal purchase and possession of a gun. He is accused of lying by saying at the time of purchasing the gun that he did not use drugs. Hunter Biden must appear next week in Washington to be booked and to present his plea of ​​guilty or not guilty, after the court has refused to allow him to do so by videoconference.

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