Hunter Biden sues Giuliani for spreading data from his laptop
Hunter Biden sued Rudy Giuliani and Giuliani's former lawyer Tuesday for their roles in disseminating personal information about Biden said to have been taken from a laptop he left at a Delaware repair shop before the 2020 election.
The suit is the latest move by Biden, President Joe Biden's son, to take a more adversarial approach with opponents who have used his troubles as the basis for political attacks on his father. Hunter Biden, who long struggled with addiction to crack cocaine and alcohol, was indicted by federal prosecutors this month on charges of lying about his drug use when he purchased a handgun in 2018, and he faces a potential indictment on tax charges.
Earlier this year, Biden sued the owner of the store where he left the laptop, and last week, he sued the IRS for the way it divulged his tax returns to Congress and a former Trump administration aide who has publicized information about him.
In the suit filed Tuesday in federal court in Los Angeles, Biden claimed that Giuliani and his former lawyer, Robert Costello, “have been primarily responsible for what has been described as the `total annihilation'” of Biden's privacy.
“For the past many months and even years, defendants have dedicated
Biden
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 they claim to have taken from the laptop, the suit says.
Among the laws Biden says that Giuliani and Costello should be held accountable for violating are the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and California's Computer Data Access and Fraud Act. The suit did not name a dollar figure.
Ted Goodman, an adviser to Giuliani, responded 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.”
Giuliani began trying to promote the contents of the laptop in the weeks before the November 2020 election, hoping to give Donald Trump an October surprise that could catapult him to victory over Joe Biden.