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Hunter Biden (Photo by Moses Robinson/Getty Images for Usher’s New Look Foundation)
For the first two years of his father’s presidency, Hunter Biden tried to go the stoic route. He kept his head down and largely refrained from public comment, even as Republicans relentlessly attacked him and made him the central focus of the just-announced impeachment inquiry into his father.
But no more.
Recently he sued John Paul Mac Isaac, the Delaware computer repairman who published the contents of what he claims was Biden’s abandoned laptop. Biden’s lawyer Abbe Lowell sent Donald Trump a cease and desist letter demanding that the former president stop defaming him on social media. And yesterday he filed suit against Garrett Ziegler, a former Trump White House lackey who went on to turn the “laptop” into a thriving business.
At only 27-years-old, Ziegler has already been in the middle of a bunch of MAGAworld controversies. The former aide to Trump’s econ crank Peter Navarro waved Sidney Powell, Mike Flynn, and Overstock founder Patrick Byrne into the White House on the evening of December 18, 2020. That led to the infamous Oval Office showdown where Trump tried to appoint Powell as special counsel to investigate the election, over the screaming objections of his own White House Counsel, Pat Cipollone. It also led to Ziegler getting his White House hall pass revoked by Mark Meadows.
Zeigler was subpoenaed by the January 6 Select Committee, where he asserted his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. But he was less circumspect afterward, livestreaming a rant where he accused the committee members of being “Bolsheviks, so, they probably do hate the American founders and most White people in general. This is a Bolshevistic anti-White campaign. If you can’t see that, your eyes are freaking closed. And so, they see me as a young Christian who they can try to basically scare, right?”
He also called whistleblower Cassidy Hutchinson a “ho.” Because he’s a classy dude.
Ziegler then went on to develop a website which functioned as a clearinghouse for several versions of Biden’s “laptop,” including one which appears to have contained hacked data from an iPhone backup to the cloud. And while this made him a star on conservative media, it put him in Biden’s crosshairs. And now, after multiple preservation letters, the Illinois resident has finally managed to get himself sued in the Central District of California for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as multiple state laws.
“Garrett Ziegler is a zealot who has waged a sustained, unhinged and obsessed campaign against Plaintiff and the entire Biden family for more than two years,” the complaint begins. “While Defendant Ziegler is entitled to his extremist and counterfactual opinions, he has no right to engage in illegal activities to advance his right-wing agenda.”
The complaint uses Ziegler’s constant media appearances against him, quoting the defendant saying “We actually got into [Plaintiff’s] iPhone backup, we were the first group to do it in June of 2022, we cracked the encrypted code that was stored on his laptop.”
It also quotes him being extremely creepy and gross:
According to Defendant Ziegler, Defendants spent “a couple of months” going through photos stored in Plaintiff’s data, organizing and modifying the photos (through what he characterizes as “redactions”), and subjecting the data to a “photo viewing app” to allow Defendants and others to “view the metadata in the photos.” Defendant Ziegler claims that Defendants’ activities are designed to allow members of the public who log onto Defendants’ website and access Defendants’ servers “to be able to see where the photo was taken, what time it was taken, if it has latitude and longitude coordinates attached to it. . . They’re going to be able to see if it has metadata like aperture, lighting.”
Through his lawyers from Winston & Strawn, Biden demands injunctive relief, as well as punitive damages and disgorgment of all profits Zeigler made off the stolen data. The case has not yet been assigned to a judge.
Biden v. Ziegler [Docket via Court Listener]
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.
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