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LOS ANGELES (CN) — Hunter Biden sued a former White House aide to Donald Trump, claiming he accessed without authorization and tampered with data obtained from hacking an encrypted iPhone backup.
President Joe Biden’s son filed the complaint Wednesday in federal court in Los Angeles accusing Garrett Ziegler of accessing, tampering with, manipulating, altering, copying and damaging computer data that he doesn’t own and that he claims to have obtained from hacking into Biden’s iPhone data and from scouring a copy of the hard drive of what he describes as Biden’s “laptop” computer.
“Garrett Ziegler is a zealot who has waged a sustained, unhinged and obsessed campaign against Plaintiff and the entire Biden family for more than two years,” Biden says in the complaint. “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.”
Biden, citing published reports, said Ziegler claimed to have obtained a copy of a hard drive from what he claimed was Biden’s “laptop” computer in December 2020 from a former co-host on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast as well as another copy of a hard drive from an associate of Rudy Giuliani.
In addition to illegally accessing and analyzing the stolen data, the plaintiffs says in the complaint that Ziegler and his Marco Polo business also have tampered with, manipulated and copied the data so that others could unlawfully access, tamper with and manipulate it as well.
Ziegler couldn’t immediately be reached for comment, but he told Politico that Biden’s lawsuit wasn’t “worth the paper it’s written on.”
The 53-year-old Biden has been in the crosshairs of Republican lawmakers and pundits that seek to discredit President Biden’s administration.
He faces two misdemeanor tax evasion charges and a separate charge for illegally purchasing a handgun — counts for which he had secured two separate plea deals aimed at keeping him out of prison. While he was set to plead guilty to those chargesin July, a Trump-appointed judge in the District of Delaware pumped the brakes on the plan, contending that the terms of the plea deal were unclear.
The White House has largely steered clear of controversy involving the president’s son, telling media earlier this summer that “the president and the first lady love their son.” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Wednesday that Hunter Biden’s legal troubles are “a personal matter for him.”
Biden’s lawsuit accuses Ziegler and Marco Polo of violating the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the California Computer Data Access and Fraud Act, and California Business and Professional Code. He seeks general and punitive damages, among other remedies, and an injunction to stop Ziegler from further using his data.
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