'Zealot' ex-Trump aide dealt another blow in Hunter Biden's laptop hacking case
A California federal judge has refused to dismiss a computer fraud case against a former Trump White House aide accused of hacking into Hunter Biden's laptop and posting its contents online.
Judge Hernán Vera of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California — a President Joe Biden appointee who donated to Biden's 2020 campaign — denied in a court filing Thursday policy analyst Garrett Ziegler's attempt to throw out the case. Ziegler was accused of unlawfully accessing, manipulating, and damaging Hunter Biden's data without his authorization or consent.
Now-convicted felon Hunter Biden sued Ziegler in September on a federal claim for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He also brought a pair of state claims for violating the state's Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act.
Vera found that Hunter Biden "sufficiently alleged the necessary elements of his claims for [sic] under federal and state computer fraud statutes."
In the lawsuit, Hunter Biden accused Ziegler of being a "zealot who has waged a sustained, unhinged and obsessed campaign" against Hunter and the Biden family for over two years.
"While Defendant Ziegler is entitled to his extremist and counterfactual opinions, he has no right to engage in illegal activities to advance his right-wing agenda. Yet that is precisely what Defendant Ziegler and his so-called 'nonprofit research group,' Defendant ICU, d/b/a/ Marco Polo, have done and have asserted they will continue to do in the future," the lawsuit said.
Biden said Ziegler's team of volunteers and independent contractors spent countless hours accessing, tampering with, manipulating, and otherwise damaging computer data that they did not own, and that they claim to have obtained from "hacking" into Biden's iPhone data and from "scouring a copy of the hard drive" of what they purport to be Biden's former laptop.
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Ziegler, who previously worked for former Trump adviser Peter Navarro, had argued that Vera ought to be kicked off the case due to his donation to the campaign of Hunter's father of "at least $1,600." A federal judge in California determined that Vera did not need to step aside.