Hunter Biden’s legal team on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against a former Trump White House staffer, accusing him of violating California and federal computer privacy laws by publishing thousands of photos and emails from the infamous laptop belonging to the president’s son.
The 14-page suit, filed in a California federal court, accuses defendant Garret Ziegler, the founder of the nonprofit Marco Polo, of “accessing, tampering with, manipulation, altering, copying and damaging computer data that they do not own and that they claim to have obtained from hacking into Plaintiff’s iPhone data and from scouring a copy of the hard drive of what they claim to be Plaintiff’s ‘laptop’ computer.”
Ziegler worked for former President Donald Trump during the last two years of his term as a policy analyst. His nonprofit created a new website in June, unveiling controversial content from the laptop to bring “truth and transparency” to America’s first family.
He told Fox News earlier this year that it took engineers on the site — BidenLaptopMedia.com — “a couple of months” to redact obscene content from thousands of photos spanning from 2008 to 2019, including images exposing Hunter’s genitals and multiple nude photos of his deceased brother Beau Biden’s wife, Hallie Biden.
“The number one thing we’re about … is truth and transparency,” Ziegler said. “If the American people want to know what their first family is like, they’re going to get it. And we’re not going to be taking out photos that paint the Bidens in a good light.”
After initially claiming the laptop that he was accused of abandoning at a Delaware computer repair shop in 2019 was either hacked, stolen, or some form of Russian disinformation campaign to hinder his father’s 2020 presidential candidacy, Hunter Biden finally admitted in a sitdown interview with CBS that it “certainly” could have belonged to him.
Then, amid working out a plea deal for a criminal probe, Biden finally admitted that the laptop packed with scandalous content was, in fact, his, according to the New York Post.
Biden’s lawsuit against Trump’s former aide says that since leaving the White House in 2021, Ziegler “has devoted most of his waking time and energy to accessing, tampering with, manipulating, altering, copying and otherwise using” the material in question.
It also said that Ziegler made inflammatory statements weeks before attorneys for the president’s son filed the lawsuit.
“Within the last two weeks, Defendant Ziegler went so far as to declare on social media that efforts by Plaintiff to serve him with legal process in the future would met with violence: ‘If the US president’s son sends a proxy [i.e., a process server] to illegally trespass on my property I will blow their f***ing brains out,’” the suit notes.
Ziegler told POLITICO on Wednesday that Biden’s legal team had not yet served him the legal documents.
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“I nor the nonprofit, Marco Polo, have been served with any lawsuit — but the one I read this morning out of the Central District of California should embarrass Winston & Strawn LLP,” he wrote in an email. “It’s not worth the paper it’s written on. Apart from the numerous state and federal laws and regulations which protect authors like me and the publishing that Marco Polo does, it’s not lost on us that Joe’s son filed this SLAPP one day after an Impeachment inquiry into his father was announced.”
Attorneys for Biden requested a jury trial based on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and California’s Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit comes after Hunter Biden called on the Justice Department to launch a criminal probe into Ziegler and others who disseminated contents from the laptop, according to CNN.
The BidenLaptopEmails.com website publicized more than 120,000 emails from the abandoned laptop.
The continued laptop exposure comes after Hunter Biden faces ongoing investigations from federal prosecutors and lawmakers into foreign business dealings and allegations of lying about tax fraud and gun purchases.