Hunter Biden has sued a laptop repairman after the contents of his computer were leaked to Trump allies. The President’s son has been embroiled in a scandal since October 2020, when leaked data from his laptop suggested Hunter provided an “opportunity” to an advisor of an energy company to meet the then-Vice President.
Hunter and his attorneys allege John Paul Mac Isaac, who runs the repair shop, illegally copied and distributed private information from the laptop’s hard drive.
Material from the laptop allegedly include texts and financial records related to his overseas business dealings in China and Ukraine, as well as provocative photos and videos of him having sex and doing drugs.
Lawyers for Hunter have now requested a jury trial to determine damages and asked that Mac Isaac return any data belonging to him.
“Mac Isaac intended and knew, or clearly should have known, that people to whom he provided the data that he believed to belong to Mr Biden would use it against then-candidate Joseph Biden and to assist then-President Trump,” the suit said.
“As a result of Mac Isaac’s unlawful agreement and his conspiracy with others, Mr Biden’s personal data was made available to third parties and then ultimately to the public at large, which is highly offensive, causing harm to Mr Biden and his reputation.
“The object of invading Mr Biden’s privacy and disseminating his data was not for any legitimate purpose but to cause harm and embarrassment to Mr Biden.”
In the lead-up to the 2020 election, Donald Trump’s then-lawyer Rudy Giuliani provided material for a New York Post article about Hunter’s corruption.
The Post reported that the FBI had seized a computer that purportedly belonged to Hunter Biden.
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In the article, it was claimed Joe met with an adviser to Burisma Burisma, whose board Hunter Biden sat on, with an email from the advisor, Vadym Pozharskyi, thanking the Vice President’s son for “giving an opportunity to meet your father”.
A Biden campaign spokesman said at the time that Biden’s official schedules did not show a meeting between the two men.
However, data leaked from Hunter’s laptop after he reportedly left it at Mac Isaac’s shop in Wilmington, Delaware since April 2019.
The owner told the New York Times that Hunter asked for any data to be recovered, but never returned to retrieve the computer or an external hard drive on which its contents had been stored.
He then decided to look at the material, calling it “alarming” and “embarrassing” before telling the FBI.
In 2019, after seeing Trump’s first impeachment proceedings, which focussed on his own dealings with Ukraine, Mac Isaac gave a copy of the hard drive to Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert J. Costello.
Giuliani then handed the data over to the Post, the outlet said and began pushing claims the Biden family were corrupt.
Mac Isaac sued Hunter last year, charging that he had been defamed by the President’s son’s claims that he had illegally accessed his data.
*This story has not been edited by The Infallible staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.