Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden, has recently filed a lawsuit against Rudy Giuliani and attorney Robert Costello for allegedly hacking into his laptop. Apart from Giuliani and Costello, Biden seems to be on a litigation spree, having sued the Internal Revenue Service over unauthorized leaks to the media[1] and MAGA supporter Garrett Zeigler, who self-declared himself as the laptop impresario[2]. A lawsuit was also filed against John Paul Mac Isaac, a Delaware computer repairman, who publicly disclosed the contents of what he claimed to be Biden’s abandoned laptop[3].
According to the filed suit in the Central District of California, Giuliani and Costello are accused of utilizing hacked credentials to breach Biden’s cloud-stored data in violation, contravening both the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the California Computer Data Access and Fraud Act[4].
Robert Costello, who emerged as an intermittent personality in the Trump administration, seemed to dangle a pardon before Michael Cohen in 2019 incentivized not to turn against Trump during the Mueller investigation[5]. He later collaborated with Giuliani in 2020 to publicize Hunter Biden’s laptop[6], and in 2021, steered his client, Steve Bannon, into a contempt of Congress indictment after advising him to buck a congressional subpoena[7]. Despite these events, the major blow arrived in 2022 when Costello testified against Cohen, his former client, before a grand jury in New York in an attempt to discredit Cohen as a witness and to defer an indictment of Donald Trump[8]. Firm Davidoff Hutcher & Citron had also filed lawsuits against Bannon[9] and Giuliani[10] over nonpayment of fees.
While Biden claims damages exceeding $75,000, journalist Marcie Wheeler suggests that the government’s investigation of Biden may have relied on a corrupted dataset, which was not handled forensically[11]. Biden now sets his aim on the whole investigation, intending to use discovery in these cases to scrutinise the entire procedure.