Hunter Biden is on the warpath against those who leaked the contents of his abandoned laptop to the media. This time former Trump attorney Rudolph Guiliani is in his crosshairs. Biden’s suit claims that Guiliani and his lawyer, Robert Costello, were responsible for the “total annihilation” of Biden’s “digital privacy.”
The New York Post report on the laptop first appeared in October 2020 just before the election brought controversies surrounding Hunter Biden to the fore. The Biden campaign responded by falsely having 51 former intelligence officials claim that the laptop was Russian “disinformation.”
“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,” Giuliani spokesman Ted Goodman told USA Today.
The suit does not formally concede the laptop in question belongs to Hunter Biden; however, it claims that the data was “manipulated, altered and damaged before it was copied and sent” to Guiliani and Costello.
Hunter Biden’s Additional Suits Over Laptop
Biden also threatened to sue former Trump aide Garrett Ziegler for disseminating its contents through a report and through the website belonging to his group Marco Polo. Ziegler posted the laptop’s contents on the web and wrote an over 600-page detailed report on its contents and alleged dozens of criminal infractions on Hunter Biden’s part as a result.
He filed a countersuit in March against John Paul Mac Isaac, the Delaware computer repair shop owner, who provided Guiliani and Costello with a copy of the hard drive.
And Hunter Biden sued the IRS for disclosing his tax data to Congress last week.
“Defendants themselves admit that their purported possession of a ‘laptop’ is in fact not a ‘laptop’ at all. It is, according to their own public statements, an ‘external drive’ that Defendants were told contained hundreds of gigabytes of Plaintiff’s personal data. At least some of the data that Defendants obtained, copied, and proceeded to hack into and tamper with belongs to Plaintiff. But Plaintiff’s data was manipulated, altered and damaged before it was copied and sent to Defendants; and Defendants’ illegal hacking and tampering has involved further alterations and damage to the data to a degree that is presently unknown to Plaintiff,” the suit states.
Was Biden’s Data Manipulated?
CBS News had the laptop’s contents examined by two cyber investigators from Minneapolis-based Computer Forensics Services last year. They found no evidence the contents of the hard drive had been tampered with.
The suit claims that “Defendant Costello has stated publicly that he intentionally tampered with, manipulated, and altered Plaintiff’s data by causing the data to be “cleaned up” from its original form (whatever this means) and by creating “a number of new [digital] folders, with titles like ‘Salacious Pics’ and ‘The Big Guy.’” Neither Mac Issac nor Defendants have ever claimed to use forensically sound methods for their hacking activities.”
It further stated that Giuliani’s copies of the hard drive data have been damaged by making it available for “himself and others to access and analyze, and further altering, impairing and damaging the data through his unlawful hacking and manipulation.”
This flurry of legal activity comes in the wake of Hunter Biden’s recent indictment on federal gun charges.
Emails from the abandoned laptop showing Joe Biden’s connection with Hunter Biden’s business dealings provided fuel that in-part led Republicans to bring forth their pending impeachment inquiry against the president.
The suit seeks untold damages from Guiliani and Costello for causing harm to Biden and his reputation. It also seeks an injunction against further use of Biden’s data.
John Rossomando is a defense and counterterrorism analyst and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, The National Interest, National Review Online, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award for his reporting.
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