Hunter Biden sues ex-Trump White House aid

The lawyers of U.S.
President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, filed a lawsuit on
Wednesday against an aide in the White House of former President
Donald Trump over the aide’s alleged role in publication of
embarrassing emails and images.
The lawsuit accuses Garrett Ziegler, a former aide to Trump
trade adviser Peter Navarro, of violating California’s computer
fraud and data access laws, and demands a jury trial. The
14-page complaint was filed in a California federal court.
Ziegler and other unnamed defendants are accused of
obtaining “tens of thousands of emails, thousands of photos, and
dozens of videos and recordings” belonging to the president’s
son and spreading them online.
The suit accuses the former Trump aide of “accessing,
tampering with, manipulating, altering, copying and damaging
computer data that they do not own.” A computer fraud sentence
can carry prison time or a fine in California.
Data that has been accessed and copied includes Hunter
Biden’s credit card details, financial and bank records, and
“information of the type contained in a file of a consumer
reporting agency,” the suit says.
At least some of the data “originally was stored on the
plaintiff’s iPhone and backed-up to plaintiff’s iCloud storage,”
and accessed by “circumventing technical or code-based barriers
that were specifically designed and intended to prevent such
access.”
The lawsuit, which was reported first by ABC News, also
seeks an injunction preventing Ziegler from continuing to access
or tamper with Biden’s data.
In a statement cited by Politico, Ziegler said he had not
officially been served with the lawsuit yet but had read about
it. “It’s not worth the paper it’s written on,” he told
Politico, adding that various state and federal laws and
regulations would protect his actions.
“It’s not lost on us that Joe’s son filed this SLAPP one day
after an impeachment inquiry into his father was announced,”
Ziegler added. SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public
Participation.
Republican U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Kevin
McCarthy on Tuesday launched an impeachment inquiry into the
president related to his son’s business dealings.
Republicans have accused the Democratic president of
profiting while he served as vice president from 2009 to 2017
from his son’s foreign business ventures, an accusation the
White House denies.
Separately, U.S. prosecutors said in a court filing earlier
this month they will seek an indictment of the president’s son
by Sept. 29 in a tax and firearms case.