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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 disgraced first son’s “digital privacy.”
The suit filed Tuesday in US District Court of Central California accuses Giuliani and his former attorney Robert Costello of violating the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act when they accessed Biden’s hard drive.
“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.
Tuesday’s lawsuit is the latest aggressive action brought by the first son’s legal team, who has also sued Delaware computer repair store owner John Paul Mac Isaac and called for criminal proceedings against him, Giuliani, former Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon, and others.
Mac Isaac’s lawyer insists the repairman became the legal owner of the laptop after Hunter Biden dropped it off in April 2019 — then failed to return to reclaim it despite attempts by Mac Isaac to contact him.
The repairman then alerted the FBI after seeing the laptop’s contents, which the lawsuit acknowledged to include “thousands of emails, bank statements and other financial documents” as well as “personal photos,” including a number of now-infamous shots of the first son doing drugs and cavorting with scantily clad sex workers.
Before the feds picked up the laptop in December 2019, Mac Isaac made a copy of the hard drive and gave it to Costello in August of the following year.
Giuliani provided The Post with a copy of the drive in October 2020, leading to a series of exclusive stories detailing the Biden family’s overseas business interests and the role the current president may have played in making money for his relatives.
Tuesday’s lawsuit cited a comment Giuliani made on his podcast earlier this year as evidence the hard drive is still the legal possession of the first son.
“This belongs to Hunter Biden,” the 79-year-old Giuliani said 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 actions, Biden’s attorneys wrote, constitute a violation of both federal and California law — though it’s unclear how the latter would apply, since Mac Isaac’s store was in Delaware and Giuliani and Costello kept the hard drive in New York.
“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 filing stated.
“Hunter Biden has previously refused to admit ownership of the laptop,” Giuliani adviser Ted Goodman told The Post in a statement responding to the suit. “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.”
Hunter Biden is due in Delaware federal court Oct. 3 to answer federal charges related to lying about his crack cocaine use on a firearm purchase form.
Meanwhile, Giuliani is facing a series of legal problems, including a claim by Costello that the former mayor has only paid a fraction of nearly $1.6 million he owes in legal fees.
Giuliani was also one of 18 Trump allies and supporters indicted alongside the former president in Georgia last month for alleged actions attempting to overturn the result of the 2020 election in the Peach State.
Attorneys for Hunter Biden did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment on the latest lawsuit.
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