Hunter Biden’s attorneys want it both ways. At Hunter Biden’s request, they will be referring Rudy Guiliani and others who have revealed what is on Hunter’s laptop to various law enforcement agencies..
At the same time, they refuse to admit the laptop is his. That seems to make lawsuits problematic. How can you sue someone for revealing the contents of your laptop if it’s not yours?
And some of the laws they cite deal with stolen information. Hunter Biden refused to pick up his laptop and pay for the repair making the owner of the repair shop the owner of the laptop.
This is a problem that could have been taken care of by paying a couple of hundred dollars and picking up the computer. Hunter plans to refer John Paul Mac Isaac, Rudy Giuliani, his attorney Robert Costello, Stephen K. Bannon, Garrett Ziegler, Jack Maxey, and Yaacov Apelbaum. Good luck with that.
Associated Press reports:
Lawyers for President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, have asked the Justice Department to investigate close allies of former President Donald Trump and others who they say accessed and disseminated personal data from a laptop that he dropped off at a Delaware computer repair shop in 2019.
In a separate letter, Biden’s attorneys have also asked Fox News host Tucker Carlson to retract and apologize for what they say are false and defamatory claims made repeatedly about him on-air, including implying without evidence that he had unauthorized access to classified documents found at his father’s home.
The request for a criminal inquiry, which comes as Hunter Biden faces his own tax evasion investigation by the Justice Department, has no practical impact and does not commit federal prosecutors to take any action. But it nonetheless represents a concerted shift in strategy and a rare public response by the younger Biden and his legal team to years of attacks by Republican officials and conservative media, scrutiny expected to continue now that the GOP has taken over the House.
It also represents the latest salvo in the long-running laptop saga, which began with a New York Post story in October 2020 that detailed some of the emails it says were found on the device related to his foreign business dealings. It was swiftly seized on by Trump as a campaign issue during the presidential election that year.
The letter, signed by prominent Washington attorney Abbe Lowell, seeks an investigation into, among others, former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, Trump’s longtime lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Giuliani’s own attorney and the Wilmington computer repair shop owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, who received Biden’s laptop in April 2019.
The letter cites passages from Mac Isaac’s book in which he admitted reviewing private and sensitive material from Biden’s laptop, including a file titled “income.pdf.” It notes that Mac Isaac sent a copy of the laptop data to Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello, who in turn shared it with Giuliani, Trump’s close ally, who at the time was pushing discredited theories about the younger Biden.
Hunter’s lawyers fired off letters to the Delaware attorney general, the Department of Justice, the I.R.S., and attorneys for Fox News and Carlson.
This is a new strategy and a risky one since this would be one of the first lawsuits if not the very first lawsuit on this matter. Should these lawsuits be allowed to go to court, the defendants would be entitled to discovery. That is why I believe this could merely be intimidation and the lawsuits could be dropped before discovery.
