Hunter Biden filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and another attorney for allegedly “hacking into” private data from his infamous laptop.
The complaint alleges Giuliani and lawyer Robert 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."
Their actions violate the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the complaint alleges.
“Defendants are among those who have been primarily responsible for what has been described as the ‘total annihilation’ of Plaintiff’s digital privacy,” says the lawsuit, which was filed in a federal court in Los Angeles.
While Biden does not acknowledge the infamous laptop is his, he states that at least “some of the data that Defendants obtained, copied, and proceeded to hack into and tamper with belongs” to him. The suit also claims the data, found on an "external drive," not a "laptop," was “manipulated, altered and damaged before it was was copied and sent to defendants; and defendants’ illegal hacking and tampering has involved further alterations and damage to the data to a degree that is presently unknown to (Hunter Biden)."
Giuliani and Costello have said they received a copy of the hard drive in August 2020 by the owner of the repair shop where Biden abandoned the so-called "laptop from hell." While the original New York Post report about it was censored ahead of the 2020 election and smeared as Russian disinformation, multiple news outlets have since verified the laptop's contents.
The effort is the latest counterattack from Hunter Biden amid increased scrutiny by congressional Republicans.