Hunter Biden sues Rudy Giuliani over laptop

Washington: Hunter Biden has filed a lawsuit against Rudy Giuliani and Giuliani’s former lawyer, Bob Costello, charging that the two men misused his personal computer data – the latest counter-attack by the president’s son against his GOP critics.

“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,” the lawsuit charges. It alleges that the duo’s actions violated the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

In 2020, Giuliani and other advocates of Donald Trump’s reelection bid touted data they had received from a laptop that Biden apparently left at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware.

As Giuliani’s lawyer, Costello received a copy of the data, which Giuliani then publicised, according to published accounts.

In the lawsuit, Biden does not concede that the laptop was his, but he does acknowledge that at least “some of the data that Defendants obtained, copied, and proceeded to hack into and tamper with belongs” to him.

The lawsuit alleges that Biden’s data was “manipulated, altered and damaged before it was copied and sent” to Giuliani and Costello.

The lawsuit notes that Giuliani regularly talked about the data in public appearances, including a podcast episode in late 2022 in which Giuliani held up a laptop computer and announced, “This is the hard drive they’re on”.

Ted Goodman, a spokesman for Giuliani, said that Biden “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”.