Hunter Biden filed suit against Rudy Giuliani Tuesday for his role in disseminating the “laptop from Hell” to the public via the New York Post ahead of the 2020 election, claiming the mayor was involved in “hacking” and “manipulation” of the first son’s data. As absurd as this claim may sound — given the mountain of documented evidence now reported by almost every outlet in America as to the laptop’s origin, chain of custody, and authenticity — it is part of a wild, “history of now” public relations effort concocted by Biden lawyer Kevin Morris.
Note: Kevin Morris and the author of this column, Emma-Jo Morris, are not related.
Hunter Biden’s legal team claimed in the suit filed against the former Big Apple mayor that, “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.’”
Note the word “alleged” — as if there is still a question about what the material obtained by Giuliani and published by the Post is based on.
But, anyway, this elaborate statement, among other things, insinuates and outright states that Rudy somehow obtained the material in a way that was untoward, criminal, or illegitimate, and attempts to cast an aspersion on the origin story of the laptop hard drive.
An exterior view of “The Mac Shop” in Wilmington, Delaware, is seen on October 21, 2020. (ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images)
To recap a story everyone already knows, Hunter Biden, who was apparently addicted to crack at the time of these events, stumbled into a computer repair shop in Delaware with a water-damaged laptop in April 2019, requesting the shopkeep, John Paul Mac Isaac, transfer the data on the broken computer onto a new computer. He signed a standard form for the service (which the Post published), saying that if he did not pay for the service within 90 days of being completed and come to collect his computer, it would be considered abandoned.
In the process of transferring the soon-to-be-first-son’s data, Mac Isaac noticed content that alarmed him. But he completed the work and called Hunter to pick up his computer. Hunter never did.
After the 90 days lapsed, Mac Isaac notified the FBI that he was in possession of the device, and they came to take it from him, giving him a subpoena as proof of receipt. But Mac Isaac still had the hard drive with the data copied, which was part of the service Hunter requested and abandoned.
Fast forward to December 2019, and Trump is being impeached for the “perfect phone call,” in which he pressed Ukrainian President Zelensky to pursue corruption involving Americans, in his eastern European country most known for that. And Mac Isaac assumes the extremely pertinent evidence to the proceeding that he just handed to the FBI would show up. But it did not. So he called Trump’s lawyer — Rudy Giuliani — to make him aware of it. Giuliani then obtained it and eventually handed it over to the New York Post, in full.
That is the story, that was always the story, that has been confirmed to be the story, and there is documentation to prove that is the story. That story at no point includes Rudy hacking Hunter’s laptop or altering its contents.
But Kevin Morris is trying to rewrite history (literally) anyway. Maybe this is what he has been planning for quite some time.
Back in May 2022, the Post’s Miranda Devine reported what appears to be the first iteration of Hunter’s alternative “theory” about the laptop’s provenance. Devine shared an image of what she reported was a hand-drawn chart by Kevin Morris detailing the alleged (and convoluted) timeline of the laptop’s origin. I encourage you, the reader, to click the link to the Post story, where you will see what appears to be created by Russell Crowe’s character in A Beautiful Mind.
President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden arrive at Fort McNair on Sunday, June 25, 2023, in Washington. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)
The lawsuit claims the material Giuliani obtained and shared with the Post was “[hacked] into,” or “taken or stolen” from Hunter’s devices, and “manipulated” and “altered.”
“Plaintiff’s data was manipulated, altered and damaged before it was copied and sent to Defendants; and Defendants’ illegal hacking and tampering has involved further alterations and damage to the data to a degree that is presently unknown to Plaintiff,” the lawsuit claims.
It also claims Giuliani keeps a copy of the hard drive on him to manipulate at any given moment, as needed. (If you are reading that in disbelief, the exact words are, “[Giuliani] apparently carries [the hard drive] around with him on a daily basis, presumably so that he can continuously access, tamper with and manipulate the data whenever and wherever he desires.”)
According to the “map” reported by Devine, this appears to be part of Hunter’s team’s public relations effort to claim that Hunter’s private information was somehow “hacked” or “cloned,” among other claims to muddy the story of the device’s chain of custody, Hunter Biden’s role in it, and its contents.
“The counternarrative Morris is mounting on Hunter’s behalf has nothing to do with the damning contents of the laptop, which have been repeatedly verified as authentic by multiple media organizations since The Post broke the story in October 2020,” Devine wrote in May of last year. “Instead, Hunter’s team is attempting to sow confusion about how the laptop became public … and claiming his private information was somehow stolen, ‘hacked’ or ‘cloned.’ But the chain of custody of that laptop has been well established by The Post.”
The lawsuit makes another claim, that Hunter “never authorized or consented to any access of his data by any Defendant at any time or for any purpose.”
Well, that’s also new, because at the time the Post did its original reporting on the laptop, when Hunter, via his lawyer at the time, George Mesires, was reached for comment, the Post received back a barely coherent response seeming to claim the reporting is a “conspiracy theory” peddled by Giuliani.
“He has been pushing widely discredited conspiracy theories about the Biden family, openly relying on actors tied to Russian intelligence,” Mesires said of Giuliani at the time, refusing to address the substance or content of the reporting.
Rudy Giuliani speaks outside the Fulton County jail, Wednesday, Aug. 23, 2023, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson, File)
Hunter wasn’t telling Giuliani to stop accessing his computer — he was denying the computer exists and calling the reporting on it “Russian intelligence!”
So, that part doesn’t really hang together, either.
This lawsuit would have you believe that Rudy Giuliani, who is nearly 80, devised and executed an elaborate operation to hack into Hunter Biden’s Mac, alter its contents so precisely as to trick a billion-dollar news corporation and its team of lawyers, and then the rest of the media in the years following, and to this day, continues to pursue this sinister plot, at any given moment, because he keeps the hard drive in his pocket.
Not only does this story make no sense, and contradict itself at various points, but it requires the audience to delete three years of reporting from their memory and, really, suspend rational function to presume 79-year-old Rudy has advanced, expert, almost other-worldly tech capabilities that would not even be seen in the CIA.
Based on those facts, perhaps this fantastical and confusing story isn’t really meant to hold up in court, but rather, to be just that, a fantastical and confusing story.
Emma-Jo Morris is the Politics Editor at Breitbart News. Email her at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter.
