(New York Post) Hunter Biden has sued Rudy Giuliani over his infamous laptop scandal, claiming that the former New York City mayor hacked and manipulated data on an external hard drive in a “total annihilation” of the troubled first son’s “digital privacy.”
The suit filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court of Central California accuses Giuliani and Robert Costello, a former federal prosecutor who defended Giuliani, of violating the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act when they accessed Biden’s hard drive, the document viewed by The Post indicated.
“For the past many months and even years, Defendants have dedicated 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 Defendants claim to have obtained from Plaintiff’s alleged “laptop” computer,” the filing read.
Giuliani and Costello contributed to the “total annihilation” of Biden’s “digital privacy” when they infiltrated the hard drive of the laptop Biden allegedly left at a Delaware repair shop in 2019, the suit alleges.
Giuliani contends the files were given to him by repair shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac.AFP via Getty Images
The two men have both publicly boasted about accessing the device, which they claim to have been given the repair shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac in Aug. 2020.
The suit even cited a Sept. 12, 2022 interview in which Costello – who was “dressed for golf” at the time – showed a reporter how they gained entry to the hard drive with Biden’s username.
The duo then “tampered with, [and] manipulated the data” and made copies to share with Steve Bannon and other allies, the filing alleged.
Dozens of compromising images and emails have since been made public.
In addition to “thousands of emails, bank statement and other financial documents,” the suit acknowledged that Giuliani and Costello accessed Biden’s “personal photos,” which included a number of now-infamous shots of the scantily-clad first son allegedly doing drugs and cavorting with sex workers.
The contents of the alleged laptop have since generated thousands of headlines, mostly from conservative media outlets intent on unmasking the Biden family’s private activities.
The new lawsuit also cited a comment Giuliani made on his podcast earlier this year.
The contents of the alleged laptop have generated thousands of headlines.
“This belongs to Hunter Biden,” the former New York City Mayor boasted while holding up a laptop during a Feb. 2 installment of “America’s Mayor Live.”
“[Giuliani] proceeded to brag about having copied [Hunter Biden’s] data onto his own computer and about having accessed, analyzed and manipulated the transferred data,” the suit claimed.
Giuliani and Costello’s antics, Biden’s attorneys wrote, constitutes a violation of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as the California Computer Data Access and Fraud Act.
The lawsuit claims Giuliani used Biden’s username to “tamper with” data.
“Although Defendants and their allies are entitled to their baseless opinions about Plaintiff and the Biden family—and they are also free to share those opinions on their podcasts and with whomever else cares about what they have to say—they are not entitled to violate federal and state anti-computer hacking laws to advance their personal and political agendas,” the scathing filing stated.
The lawsuit against Giuliani and Costello is the latest strike in Hunter Biden’s months-long effort to push back against the tidal wave of backlash over the laptop’s content.
In February, Biden’s lawyer Abbe Lowell – who was tapped this week to represent disgraced Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) – served 14 Republican media figures and one-time officials with letters that warned of future litigation over their accusations toward the troubled first son, CBS noted.
