Hunter Biden sues former Trump aide over release of laptop materials online
Sarah D. WireSept. 13, 2023
Hunter Biden
on Wednesday
sued a former
Trump administration
aide
in California federal court Wednesday, alleging that heto former President Donald Trump over his part in
publishe
ding
emails, images, videos and recordings belonging to Biden
online
.
The 13-page suit
, filed in federal court in California,
accuses Garrett Ziegler, his company and
10ten
unnamed defendants of improperly “accessing, tampering with, manipulating, altering, copying and damaging computer data that they do not own” in violation of the state’s computer fraud laws.
Ziegler, a former aide to White House trade advisor Peter Navarro, has emerged
o i
n far-right media
circles
as one of the Biden family’s most outspoken critics. An attorney for Ziegler did not immediately answer a request for comment Wednesday.
The suit centers around a now-infamous laptop,
apparently purportedly leftabandoned
by Biden at a Wilmington, Del.,
aware
repair shop and found by Republican operatives weeks before the 2020 election,
whichthat
has become a
centralkey
part of allegations of corruption
involvingbyHunter President
Biden
‘s son
.
Ziegler
‘s’s
has said
his
“nonprofit research group” Marco Polo has posted
online over the past two years thousands of more than 120,000
emails,
10,000
photos,
(some graphic) as well as
text messages and other documents
purportedly from Hunter Biden’s iPhone backup and cloud storage online over the past two years, and promised more troves to come including video
.
The suit
alleges thatclaims that
Ziegler and and the unnamed co-defendants have ignored requests to stop releasing the information and return it to Biden,
claiming thatandinstead
they
instead
doubled down and vowed to continue violating the law.
Biden is seeking a jury trial to determine damages as well as an injunction to prevent Ziegler from continuing to share the information online.
Biden’s attorneys
saycharacterize
Ziegler
as
“
a zealot who
has waged a sustained, unhinged and obsessed campaign against [Hunter Biden] and the entire Biden family for more than two years.”
The filing describes
in detail
how Ziegler and
the
10
additional
unnamed defendants allegedly obtained data belonging to Hunter Biden from other Trump allies in January 2021 and disseminated “tens of thousands of emails, thousands of photos, and dozens of videos and recordings” on the internet. It accuses Ziegler and the defendants of hacking an encrypted iPhone and Biden’s online cloud storage.
In March, Bidens legal team filed a lawsuit against John Paul Mac Isaac,
athe
computer repairman in Delaware who claimed he obtained the laptop
and distributed data from it
. Biden’s lawyers
have
also previously referred Ziegler to federal and state prosecutors for alleged criminal behavior.
