Hunter Biden sues former Trump White House aide over laptop data

Hunter Biden filed a lawsuit this week against a former Trump White House aide over his alleged role in the laptop data scandal, which the first son’s attorneys blasted as a “sustained, unhinged and obsessed campaign” to advance an “extremist” agenda.

The 14-page complaint filed in California federal court Wednesday accuses Garrett Ziegler, a one-time aide to President Donald Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, of violating the state’s computer fraud and data laws by accessing “tens of thousands of emails, thousands of photos, and dozens of videos and recordings” that belonged to Hunter, according to the suit viewed by The Post.

Ziegler and 10 other unnamed defendants ”spent countless hours accessing, tampering with, manipulating, altering, copying and damaging computer data that they do not own,” the filing claims.

Some of the data — which included Hunter Biden’s financial and bank records and even credit card details — was stored on the troubled first son’s iPhone and backed up via iCloud, meaning it was accessed by “circumventing technical or code-based barriers that were specifically designed and intended to prevent such access,” according to the complaint, which was first reported by ABC News.

Garrett Ziegler is being sued by Hunter Biden for his alleged role in the laptop data scandal.Facebook / The Kari Lake

Ziegler then doggedly circulated the contents of the data, including boasting about it on the website of his nonprofit, Marco Polo.

“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 attorneys wrote of Ziegler, who is now one of the Biden camp’s more outspoken critics.

“Within the last two weeks, Defendant Ziegler went so far as to declare on social media that efforts by Plaintiff to serve him with legal process in the future would be met with violence: ‘If the US president’s son sends a proxy [i.e., a process server] to illegally trespass on my property I will blow their f—ing brains out,’” the suit read, citing some of Ziegler’s more inflammatory comments in the weeks before the filing.

Hunter Biden’s laptop contents were initially reported by the New York Post.

The lawsuit is seeking a jury trial under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and California’s Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act, which allows plaintiffs to sue those they believe harmed them by accessing their data without permission, according to court filings.

Computer fraud cases can carry prison sentences and hefty fines in California.

Ziegler worked at the White House from February 2019 through January 2021, according to CNN.

Hunter is also suing John Paul Mac Isaac, a computer repairman in Delaware.Robert Miller

In an emailed statement to Politico, Ziegler said the lawsuit is “not worth the paper it’s written on.”

“I nor the nonprofit, Marco Polo, have been served with any lawsuit — but the one I read this morning out of the Central District of California should embarrass Winston & Strawn LLP,” he scoffed.

“Apart from the numerous state and federal laws and regulations which protect authors like me and the publishing that Marco Polo does, it’s not lost on us that Joe’s son filed this SLAPP one day after an Impeachment inquiry into his father was announced.” The acronym he used refers to a “strategic lawsuit against public participation” — seen as an effort to stifle critics.

The Mac Shop, where the laptop scandal claims originated in October 2020.AFP via Getty Images

The California lawsuit is part of Hunter Biden’s legal campaign against those who reportedly played a role in the infamous laptop scandal in the run-up to the 2020 election.

In March, the younger Biden’s lawyers filed another suit against John Paul Mac Isaac, the Delaware computer repairman who allegedly obtained and spread the data from Hunter’s laptop in April 2019, the outlet noted.

That case remains ongoing.

Hunter Biden’s data also included dozens of photos with scantily clad sex workers.

The Biden attorneys have also been circling Ziegler for several months: Earlier this year, Hunter’s representative Abbe Lowell sent two letters asking the former aide to save documents tied to the laptop issue, which indicated plans to initiate formal litigation, according to ABC.

The high-profile laptop lawsuit comes at a trying period of Hunter Biden, 53, who just months ago saw the collapse of a plea deal on misdemeanor tax offenses and a felony gun charge that would have cushioned the federal probe into his international business activities.

On Tuesday, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) announced plans to order House Republicans to launch a formal impeachment inquiry into President Biden over the family’s foreign business deals.

Hunter Biden and President Biden have faced years of scrutiny over their foreign business dealings.AFP via Getty Images

“Through our investigations, we have found that President Biden did lie to the American people about his own knowledge of his family’s foreign business dealings,” McCarthy alleged.

The next day, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre appeared to flee the briefing room when a Post reporter asked about the president’s connections to his son’s foreign partners. 

Earlier in the briefing, Jean-Pierre referred to the impeachment proceedings as “baseless” and insisted that Biden, 80, “did nothing wrong.”

Attorneys for Hunter Biden did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.

With Post wires