Hunter Biden’s competing approaches in court to his laptop contents

Hunter Biden’s computer data, long a source of national scrutiny, is now a central feature in his various legal battles, but the first son is handling the data in different ways depending on the case, according to his court filings.

Biden is aiming to prove data belongs to him in a lawsuit against former Trump White House aide Garrett Ziegler and his company Marco Polo. Meanwhile in Delaware, Biden has distanced himself from his computer data and said he will fight to suppress it in a criminal case brought by special counsel David Weiss.

Last fall, Biden sued Ziegler, alleging he gained unauthorized access to Apple iCloud backup data and copies of an external hard drive.

The first son’s laptop and hard drive, which he abandoned at a Delaware repair shop in 2019, first made headlines in 2020 when various operatives obtained copies of them and provided the material to the New York Post to publish ahead of the presidential election his father was running in.

Hunter Biden was asked directly if the laptop the New York Post wrote about was his in a 2021 CBS interview, and he responded that he did not know.

“There could be a laptop out there that was stolen from me. It could be that I was hacked. It could be that it was Russian intelligence,” Hunter Biden said when pressed on the matter.

Ziegler’s company Marco Polo has since spread data from the laptop in a highly public and prolific manner, and Hunter Biden has admitted in court filings that at least some of it belongs to him, though he also repeats that it has been “manipulated” and “tampered with.”

“Regardless of how Defendants, without his permission, came to possess Plaintiff’s data, once Plaintiff’s data was in their custody, they accessed, tampered with, analyzed, and manipulated the data over an extended period of time,” Hunter Biden’s defense attorneys wrote.

Ziegler asked the judge in the case to drop the lawsuit, arguing that Hunter Biden cannot claim to have ownership over copies of data, such as backup data and copies of external hard drives. Hunter Biden’s defense team shot back that the argument was “baseless.”

Hacking statutes do not require Hunter Biden to prove “‘ownership’ or ‘control’ of the physical ‘computer’ or ‘device’ that Defendants accessed,” defense attorneys wrote.

They noted an appellate court had held that ownership of a “‘computer’ is not required and that a plaintiff may seek redress where, as here, he is ‘proximately harmed by unauthorized access, particularly if [he has] rights to the data stored on it.’”

While Hunter Biden has broadly admitted to being the owner of some of the data, the case is still in an early stage and whether he takes more explicit ownership over specific copies of his data and the specific contents of it remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, in his criminal case in Delaware related to gun charges, Hunter Biden has mostly dismissed the laptop’s authenticity so far, though the case is still in its pretrial phase. The first son also indicated that he will argue that its data should be inadmissible as evidence. Weiss first obtained and searched the laptop and hard drive in 2019 after subpoenaing it from the aforementioned repair shop.

“Questions remain about the provenance and total authenticity of the data on the laptop image and hard drive the government seized, as both had been reviewed and likely altered before coming into the hands of the prosecution,” Hunter Biden’s defense attorneys wrote in one filing.

They further asked Weiss to provide as part of discovery an “exact copy of the laptop so it could be examined in the same way in which it was originally found.”

In a sign that they will continue to raise questions about its authenticity, the defense attorneys said they made the request because the original version would “be needed, for example, to challenge the chain of custody, provenance, or likely tampering with the data before it came into the possession of the government.”

They also argued that Weiss allegedly made a glaring Fourth Amendment violation by searching backup data, the external hard drive, and the laptop using warrants that only specified that they were going to be used to search for tax crimes, not firearms crimes.

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Weiss executed a search warrant of Hunter Biden’s laptop related specifically to firearms charges three months after he indicted the younger Biden. Weiss has contended that the evidence he plans to use against the first son is bolstered by but not reliant on what he gathered from that final warrant.

Hunter Biden nevertheless said he “intends to challenge” the admissibility of any evidence garnered from that final search warrant by moving to suppress it.

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