More Legal Issues for Hunter Biden? The president’s son appeared Thursday for a deposition in the lawsuit filed by the owner of the shop where he dropped off his infamous laptop.
Hunter Biden participated in a legal proceeding Thursday, but it had nothing to do with his recent plea deal involving his tax and gun cases, nor any of the things he’s been investigated for by the House Oversight Committee.
According to Fox News, the president’s son was seen entering a building Thursday for a deposition in the lawsuit that was filed against him by John Paul Mac Isaac. Mac Isaac is the owner of the computer repair shop in Delaware where Hunter, in 2019, dropped off his infamous laptop, which later ended up in the hands of his family’s political enemies.
Mac Isaac, in 2022, sued Hunter Biden for defamation. The presidential son later countersued, claiming that Mac Isaac “illicitly distributed Biden’s personal data,” per Fox News. The case is a civil suit and does not entail any criminal legal jeopardy for the president’s son.
It was one of the strangest stories of the 2020 campaign, when the New York Post reported that Hunter Biden had dropped off his laptop at The Mac Shop, and never returned to pick it up. That laptop, later turned over to Rudy Giuliani and others associated with Donald Trump, contained numerous embarrassing details, from emails about Biden’s business dealings to photos of the president’s son nude and in the act of taking drugs.
This set off numerous controversies about how social media companies handled the laptop story; Twitter and Facebook, in the opening days of the story, had throttled distribution of it, on suspicion that it was a Russian disinformation campaign. Later that week, a group of national security and intelligence veterans wrote a letter stating their belief that the laptop story looked like Russian disinformation.
Mac Isaac, late in 2020, sued Twitter for defamation, claiming that their blocking the story had falsely labeled him a hacker; that suit was later dismissed with prejudice since Twitter had never named Mac Isaac or the store. In 2022, Mac Isaac went on to sue a long list of other people and institutions, including Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), CNN, the Daily Beast, and Politico.
“After fighting to reveal the truth, all I want now is for the rest of the country to know that there was a collective and orchestrated effort by social and mainstream media to block a real story with real consequences for the nation,” the store owner told the New York Post at the time.
Mac Isaac has stated that the laptop was considered “abandoned” after Hunter Biden did not claim it after 90 days had passed.
Hunter Biden’s countersuit came in March 2023, after he hired Washington power lawyer Abbe Lowell.
This was seen, per CBS News, as part of “a strategic shift by the president’s son, aimed at aggressively pushing back after years of withering attacks from allies and aides of former President Donald Trump.” And this included striking back against insinuations about his overseas business dealings.
“Hunter Biden, a private citizen with every right to pursue his own business endeavors, joined several business partners in seeking a joint venture with a privately-owned, legitimate energy company in China,” a spokesperson for the president’s son said back in March.
“As part of that joint venture, Hunter received his portion of good faith seed funds which he shared with his uncle, James Biden, and Hallie Biden, with whom he was involved with at the time, and sharing expenses. The accounts so dramatically listed by Rep. Comer belonged to Hunter, his uncle, and Hallie – nobody else.”
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Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review, and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
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