(The Hill) — Hunter Biden filed a countersuit on Friday against the computer repairman who said he distributed the contents of a laptop that Biden left behind at his Delaware shop.
The 42-page filing in federal court includes six privacy-related counts against John Paul Mac Isaac, the repairman.
It takes aggressive aim at Mac Isaac, saying he violated Hunter Biden’s privacy by viewing the salacious contents and then distributing them in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election both to members of his family and an attorney for Rudy Giuliani.
“Mac Isaac knowingly and willfully shared with others the personal data of Mr. Biden that he came to possess (regardless of how he came to possess the data), despite it being reckless and unreasonable for any computer repairman to make copies of another’s personal and sensitive information and to then send that data to third parties without the authority to do so,” Biden’s attorneys wrote in the filing.
The purported laptop’s contents came to light in October 2020, when The New York Post published emails it said shows Biden leveraging the influence of his father, who served as vice president at the time, in the younger Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine. The president has said his son did nothing wrong.
The story became the subject of intense controversy in the final days of the 2020 presidential campaign amid debates over the hard drive’s veracity, and Republicans have since lambasted social media companies for limiting the spread of the story since some of its contents have been verified.
Biden’s attorneys did not concede that the president’s son dropped off the laptop at Mac Isaac’s shop in April 2019, as Mac Isaac claims, but acknowledged in the filing that “at some point, Mac Isaac obtained electronically stored data, some of which belonged to Mr. Biden.”
The president’s son’s attorneys noted the shared contents included images of drug use and other private material, asking for a jury trial to order Mac Isaac to return any data he claims belonged to Biden and pay an unspecified amount of damages.
The Hill has reached out to Mac Isaac’s attorney for comment.
Mac Isaac says he was able to view and distribute the contents because Biden signed a repair authorization form that deems equipment abandoned if it remains at the shop for more than 90 days after service is complete.
Biden’s attorneys pushed back by saying it was written in small-print font at the bottom of the page, arguing a Delaware law should instead apply that wouldn’t consider the property abandoned until at least one year passed. It would have also required Mac Isaac to provide various notifications first.
“At no time did Mr. Biden grant Mac Isaac any permission to access, review, copy, or disseminate for his own purposes any electronically stored data that ever was created or received or maintained by Mr. Biden (regardless of how Mac Isaac came into possession of such material),” Biden’s attorneys wrote.