Hunter Biden had filed a lawsuit against former Trump lawyer and New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and Giuliani's former attorney, Robert Costello, alleging that the men misused data on his personal laptop.
In October of 2020, Giuliani supplied a hard drive to conservative publication The New York Post, detailing reported corruption exposed in a trove of email correspondences between Hunter Biden, his father, Joe Biden, and a top Ukrainian businessman. Giuliani and other MAGA allies alleged that they gleaned the data from a computer that Hunter Biden had reported to left at a tech repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware. Costello obtained a copy of the data, which Giuliani subsequently released to the public. The lawsuit claims that the pair acted in violation of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Last week, Costello sued his former client for failing to pay more than $1.3 million in legal fees, compounding Giuliani's mounting legal woes.
"For the past many months and even years, Defendants have dedicated an extraordinary amount of time and energy toward looking for, hacking into, tampering with, manipulating, copying, disseminating, and generally obsessing over data that they were given that was taken or stolen from Plaintiff's devices or storage platforms, including what Defendants claim to have obtained from Plaintiff's alleged "laptop" computer," the suit purports. Biden in the suit does not admit that the laptop was his, but states that "some of the data that Defendants obtained, copied, and proceeded to hack into and tamper with belongs."
