Hunter Biden filed a lawsuit Friday against the computer repairman, John Paul Mac Isaac, who turned over files on a laptop Hunter left at his shop to the New York Post ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
Hunter Biden “had more than a reasonable expectation of privacy that any data that he created or maintained,” reads the lawsuit filed with a Delaware federal court Friday morning. The president’s son was under the impression it “would not be accessed, copied, disseminated, or posted on the Internet for others to use against him or his family or for the public to view.”
Lawyers representing Hunter Biden have challenged Mac Isaac’s assertion that his failure to retrieve the laptop after 90 days granted the Delaware repairman its ownership.
“Contrary to Mac Isaac’s Repair Authorization form, Delaware law provides that tangible personal property is deemed abandoned,” the lawsuit explained. Rather, the legal team insists that Hunter Biden had rightful ownership to “assert or declare property rights to the property for a period of 1 year.”
In late January, Mac Isaac hired a private investigator to locate Biden in Culver City, Calif., and serve the president’s son with a $1.5 million lawsuit seeking damages. The computer repairman alleges that Biden and his legal team are trying to pursue criminal charges against Mac Isaac as an act of reprisal for sharing the contents of the laptop.
“He’s trying to intimidate. And it’s interesting to me that this happened when it did,” Mac Isaac’s lawyer Brian Della Rocca told Tucker Carlson on Fox News.
On April 12, 2019, Biden brought the laptop to Mac Isaac’s store seeking to determine if data on three devices could be recovered. However, Biden failed to return to collect the equipment and never paid Mac Isaac for his services.
The files eventually made their way to the New York Post less than a month before the 2020 presidential election. Dubbed “The Laptop from Hell” by the Miranda Devine of the Post, early reporting showed that Hunter Biden had introduced a Ukrainian energy executive to then-vice-president Joe Biden and chronicled other unseemly business dealings that suggested influence peddling.
When the articles were first published, social-media networks including Twitter and Facebook, quickly banned the dissemination of their content, alleging it may have been the product of election interference on the part of Russian intelligence.
The legal move represents the latest escalation in Hunter Biden’s tiff with Mac Isaac that saw the president’s son hire prominent criminal defense attorney, Abbe Lowell, who has issued a raft of cease-and-desist letters to Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, the Department of Justice, and the Internal Revenue Agency in recent weeks.
Another lawyer retained by Biden, Bryan Sullivan, zeroed in on Fox News and Tucker Carlson, demanding the network retract its earlier reporting on the laptop. The star anchor, Sullivan alleged, is in “flagrant violation of all journalistic professionalism,” which might make the news outlet liable for “potential litigation.”
The president’s son is requesting a jury trial and “compensatory damages” from Mac Isaac.
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