Hunter Biden Sues Rudy Giuliani For Computer Hacking

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(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Hunter Biden came out swinging today — again! — with yet another lawsuit. This time, he’s suing Rudy Giuliani and attorney Robert Costello for hacking into his “laptop.”

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Recently the president’s son has been on a litigation tear. He sued the IRS over the supposed whistleblowers’ unauthorized leaks to the media. He sued MAGA shit-stirrer Garrett Zeigler, the self-professed laptop impresario. He sued John Paul Mac Isaac, the Delaware computer repairman who published the contents of what he claims was Biden’s abandoned laptop. And now he’s suing Trump’s pro bono lawyer and his onetime pal Bob for hacking into his laptop and iCloud accounts in their desperate attempt to find dirt on then-candidate Joe Biden.

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Costello has been the Forrest Gump of Trumpworld, although considerably less lovable. In 2018, he appeared to dangle a pardon before Michael Cohen as incentive not to flip on Trump during the Mueller investigation. In 2020, he worked with Rudy Giuliani to publicize Hunter Biden’s “laptop,” which was really a dataset supposedly imaged from a hard drive. In 2021, Costello steered his client Steve Bannon into a contempt of Congress indictment after advising him to blow off a congressional subpoena.

Those were the salad days, before everyone turned against him. In 2022, he testified against Cohen before a grand jury in New York in a failed attempt to demolish his “former client’s” credibility as a witness and stave off an indictment of the Donald Trump. And this year, he and his firm Davidoff Hutcher & Citron sued Bannon and Giuliani for nonpayment of fees, prompting Rudy to whine to CBS, “I can’t express how personally hurt I am by what Bob Costello has done.”

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But now Bob and Rudy are back together again, albeit for a roadtrip they would probably both rather skip. According to Hunter Biden, who filed suit in the Central District of California, the pair used hacked credentials to breach his data stored in the cloud, in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the California Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (Cal. Penal Code § 520), the same allegations Biden made in his suit against Zeigler.

“By booting up and logging into an ‘external drive’ containing Plaintiff’s data and using Plaintiff’s username to gain access Plaintiff’s data, Defendant Costello unlawfully accessed, tampered with and manipulated Plaintiff’s data in violation of federal and state law,” Biden argues. “Plaintiff is informed and believes and thereon alleges that Defendants used similar means to unlawfully access Plaintiff’s data many times over many months and that their illegal hacking activities are continuing to this day.”

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Biden, whose attorneys at Winston & Strawn include Abbe Lowell, alleges damages in excess of $75,000. This may prompt some heartburn for Costello, although it’s only a drop in the bucket for Rudy Giuliani, who is staring down the damages abyss with a recent default judgment in the defamation suit brought by Georgia poll workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. But while Biden demands disgorgement of all profits derived from the theft of his data, he appears to have larger goals extrinsic to the suit itself.

As journalist Marcie Wheeler points out, there’s strong evidence that the government’s investigation of Biden relied on a corrupted dataset which was never handled forensically — a possible reason that prosecutors wanted to settle the case without having to go to trial. Now that they’re vowing to charge him with tax crimes, as well as possible unregistered foreign lobbying, Biden is going to use discovery in these cases to put the entire investigation under a microscope.

And he’s going to do it in a venue which is distinctly inconvenient for all the parties. It’s going to either be a roaring disaster, or the best old man buddy movie of all time.

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Maybe both!

Biden v. Giulian [Docket via Court Listener]

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Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.

Topics

Courts, Hunter Biden, Rudy Giuliani