Hunter Biden sues Rudy Giuliani and another lawyer over accessing and sharing of his personal data

WASHINGTON (AP) — Hunter Biden sued Rudy Giuliani and another attorney Tuesday, saying the two wrongly accessed and shared his personal data after obtaining it from the owner of a Delaware computer repair shop.

The lawsuit was the latest in a new strategy by Hunter Biden to strike back against Republican allies of Donald Trump, who have traded and passed around his private data including purported emails and embarrassing images in their effort to discredit his father, President Joe Biden.

The suit accuses Giuliani and attorney Robert Costello of spending years “hacking into, tampering with, manipulating, copying, disseminating, and generally obsessing over” the data that was “taken or stolen” from Biden’s devices or storage, leading to the “total annihilation” of Biden’s digital privacy.

The suit filed in California also claims Biden’s data was “manipulated, altered and damaged” before it was sent to Giuliani and Costello, and has been further altered since then. Accessing, opening and sharing it broke laws against computer hacking, the suit argues. It seeks unspecified damages and a court order to return the data and make no more copies.

Ted Goodman, a political adviser to Giuliani, said it was false to claim Giuliani manipulated the laptop hard drive, but he was “not surprised … considering the sordid material and potential evidence of crimes on that thing.”

Costello used to represent Giuliani, but recently filed a lawsuit against the former New York City mayor saying he did not pay more than $1.3 million in legal bills.

Costello declined to comment. In February, he told The Associated Press that a letter from Hunter Biden’s lawyers that requested a Justice Department investigation of him and others related to the laptop was a “frivolous legal document” that “reeks of desperation because they know judgment day is coming for the Bidens.”

Tuesday’s lawsuit marks the latest turn in the long-running laptop saga, which began with a New York Post story in October 2020 that detailed some of the emails it says were found on the device related to Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings. It was swiftly seized on by Trump as a campaign issue during the presidential election that year.