Hunter Biden sued Rudy Giuliani on Tuesday, alleging the former lawyer of President Trump played a central role in the “total annihilation” of Biden’s digital privacy and data related to his infamous laptop computer.
Biden filed the 15-page complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, which also named Giuliani’s companies and attorney and former federal prosecutor Robert Costello, who reportedly represented Giuliani as a defendant, accusing them of violating the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Attorneys for Biden seek a court order to prevent the Defendants from accessing, tampering with, manipulating, or copying Biden’s data and returning any content related to the laptop to the president’s son.
“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 generally 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,” Biden’s attorneys wrote in the complaint.
The suit also alleges the defendants admitted their possession of the content came from an “external drive” rather than an actual laptop reportedly left at a computer repair shop in Delaware in 2019. The data was “manipulated, altered and damaged” before the contents were copied and sent to Giuliani and Costello, the suit claims with “further alterations and damage to the data” unknown to the president’s son.
In the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, Giuliani disseminated emails, pictures and videos, and other data from Hunter’s laptop to the New York Post that implicated President Joe Biden in a Ukrainian business deal that placed Hunter on the board during his father’s time as Vice President during the Obama administration.
After initially claiming the laptop that he was accused of abandoning at the shop 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 Post.
Ted Goodman, spokesman for Giuliani, told CNBC in a statement, “Hunter Biden has previously refused to admit ownership of the laptop.”
“I’m not surprised he’s now falsely claiming his laptop hard drive was manipulated by Mayor Giuliani, considering the sordid material and potential evidence of crimes on that thing,” Goodman said.
House Republicans recently opened a formal impeachment inquiry against Biden after lawmakers accused him of using his vice presidency to dissuade Ukrainian prosecutors from investigating the company. GOP officials also claim to have uncovered millions of dollars funneled to members of Biden’s family from foreign nationals.
Biden has repeatedly claimed he never spoke with his son about foreign business dealings.
The latest lawsuit from Hunter Biden comes after a separate case filed by his legal team accused former Trump White House staffer Garret Ziegler, the founder of the nonprofit Marco Polo, of violating California and federal computer privacy laws by publishing thousands of photos and emails from the laptop.
Ziegler worked for 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.