Hunter Biden sues ex-Trump staffer tied to laptop’s dissemination

Hunter Biden’s legal team is going on offense.

In a lawsuit filed Wednesday, the president’s son is accusing former Trump White House staffer Garrett Ziegler of violating California and federal computer privacy laws.

The suit, which focuses on Ziegler’s publication of the purported contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, as well as an encrypted iPhone backup, represents an escalation in the legal fights that have shadowed the Biden presidency.

The suit says that since leaving the White House, Ziegler “has devoted most of his waking time and energy to accessing, tampering with, manipulating, altering, copying and otherwise using” the data in question.

It also noted particularly incendiary comments that Ziegler made in the weeks before the suit was filed.

“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.

Hunter Biden filed the suit on Wednesday in federal court in the Central District of California, where he now lives. Earlier this year, his legal team called on the Justice Department to open criminal investigations into Ziegler and others who distributed the laptop’s contents, as CNN reported. The suit comes a day after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy authorized an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden over allegations that he was involved in, and profited from, his son’s business activities.

Ziegler told POLITICO that he has not been served.

"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."

Ziegler has worked to circulate the contents of the hard drive, purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden, including touting his efforts on the website of his nonprofit group Marco Polo. The hard drive was first reported on by the New York Post. Since then, POLITICO reporter Ben Schreckinger has confirmed the accuracy of some emails associated with it. Ziegler published thousands of emails from the hard drive on the website of his group, Marco Polo USA.

The younger Biden says in the lawsuit that the data appears to have been manipulated both before and after Ziegler obtained it. Now, years after the Post first reported on its contents, Biden is suing Ziegler under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as California’s Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act. Under that law, people can sue others who harm them by accessing their computers or data without their permission, as detailed in jury instructions published by Justia.com.

Hunter Biden’s laptop was reportedly found at a repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware, owned by John Paul Mac Isaac. Mac Isaac sued POLITICO, CNN, Hunter Biden, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and the Biden presidential campaign committee for defamation and civil conspiracy in 2022. The case remains pending in Sussex County, Del.

Ziegler worked under trade advisor Peter Navarro at the White House during the Trump administration. He drew national media attention, as well as the scrutiny of the congressional committee investigating Jan. 6, for escorting Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn into the White House on Dec. 18, 2020. Powell and Flynn then reportedly urged Trump — unsuccessfully — to use the military to seize voting machines.

In the years since then, Ziegler’s group has published what he calls “128k emails from the Biden Laptop, which is a modern Rosetta Stone of white and blue collar crime under the patina of ‘the Delaware Way.’” This summer, he also published thousands of photos that he says came from Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Kevin Morris, a lawyer for Hunter Biden who has also provided him with financial assistance, has long pushed for the first son to adopt a more aggressive posture, according to a person familiar with the legal strategy.

Last month, Chris Clark — one of Hunter Biden’s top lawyers — stopped representing him in anticipation of being a witness in possible future proceedings. Federal prosecutors reached a deal this summer with Biden’s lawyers to resolve their criminal investigation of him without going to trial. But that deal collapsed after facing scrutiny from a federal judge, and now prosecutors say they will seek an indictment of the president’s son on gun charges sometime this month.