President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden has filed a lawsuit against Rudy Giuliani and Giuliani’s former attorney Robert Costello accusing the pair of illegally accessing, hacking and manipulating his stolen personal data.
Giuliani and Costello are primarily responsible for the “total annihilation” of Biden’s digital privacy after data from his electronic devices was taken or stolen from him, the lawsuit filed Tuesday in California alleges.
The lawsuit says that for years, Giuliani and Costello “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 Biden.
In a statement, Giuliani spokesperson Ted Goodman said Biden had previously refused to admit he owned 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,” Goodman said.
The complaint against Giuliani is Hunter Biden’s third lawsuit this month over the dissemination of his personal information. Biden sued the IRS last week in response to whistleblowers revealing details about a criminal investigation into his taxes, and the week prior he sued Garrett Ziegler, a former Trump White House aide who maintains a searchable online database of Biden’s digital life, including thousands of emails and photos.
Since 2019, while acting as the personal attorney for former President Donald Trump, Giuliani has sought incriminating information against the Bidens, traveling to Ukraine on Trump’s behalf to conduct interviews. He eventually came into possession of Biden’s data.
Giuliani and Costello have said they obtained Biden’s hard drive from John Paul Mac Isaac, a computer repair shop owner who said the president’s son dropped off his laptop for repairs in 2019 and never returned to pick it up. Biden sued Mac Isaac earlier this year.
The lawsuits against Ziegler, Giuliani and Costello allege that not only did they browse Biden’s hard drive, they also hacked into his iCloud storage and obtained an iPhone backup “by circumventing technical or code-based barriers that were designed and intended to prevent such access.”
Republicans have probed Biden’s private info in their investigations, including by looking at emails to pinpoint dates Hunter Biden talked to or met with foreign nationals with whom he had business relationships, in search of evidence that Joe Biden was involved in his son’s work. So far, they haven’t found a direct link, but they have nevertheless launched an impeachment inquiry against the president.
At a hearing earlier this year, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) displayed nude photos of Hunter Biden apparently with a sex worker. Biden has said he was addicted to crack cocaine in 2018 and 2019 before getting sober.
The suit accuses the pair of violating the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as a California law dealing with data access and fraud.
