Left: Hunter Biden, (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky); Right: Rudy Giuliani (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana).
A federal lawsuit Hunter Biden filed against Rudy Giuliani over the alleged “hacking into” of an “encrypted iPhone backup,” propelling an “unhinged and obsessed” laptop-focused “campaign” against the “entire Biden family,” will be moved to the Southern District of New York, where the high-profile defendant made his name as U.S. attorney.
Biden’s attorney Paul Salvaty on Friday filed a brief stipulation on the California docket where the lawsuit was originally filed, explaining that the plaintiff and the several defendants, including Giuliani, his former attorney Robert Costello, and Giuliani’s companies, had agreed to move the case to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
“Plaintiff ROBERT HUNTER BIDEN and Defendants GIULIANI PARTNERS, LLC, GIULIANI GROUP, LLC, GIULIANI SECURITY & SAFETY, LLC, and ROBERT J. COSTELLO, by and through their respective counsel, jointly request the Court to take Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss Pursuant to Rules 12(b)(2) and 12(b)(6) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and Cal. Civ. Proc. Code Section 425.16 (the ‘Motion’) off calendar,” the stipulation said, noting that the parties “will negotiate and submit within the next ten (10) days a further stipulation and proposed order regarding further proceedings in this action including, but not limited to, the transfer of this case” to the East Coast.
In late September, weeks after his Delaware indictment, the son of President Joe Biden sued Giuliani on the West Coast, claiming the former NYC mayor and Donald Trump attorney engaged in “unlawful hacking activities” while “generally obsessing” over data culled from Biden’s “alleged ‘laptop’ computer.”
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) lawsuit also alleged violations of California Business & Professions Code barring “any unlawful, unfair or fraudulent business act or practice and unfair, deceptive, untrue or misleading advertising.”
“It is, according to their own public statements, an ‘external drive’ that Defendants were told contained hundreds of gigabytes of Plaintiff’s personal data. At least some of the data that Defendants obtained, copied, and proceeded to hack into and tamper with belongs to Plaintiff,” the complaint said. “But 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.”
Since that time, Hunter Biden was hit with a second indictment and Rudy Giuliani was bankrupted for defaming Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two Georgia election workers Giuliani wrongly accused of helping to steal the 2020 election from Trump.
Giuliani in December filed for bankruptcy in the Southern District of New York after being slapped with a $148 million judgment, a judgment he said he would appeal. As the bankruptcy moved forward, two Biden attorneys entered notices of appearance in early January, the docket shows.
Last Friday, an adversary case and complaint said that Giuliani “treated the judicial process and its rules as something that does not apply to him,” so he should not be able to “hide behind bankruptcy to escape those consequences and accountability for the devastating impact his actions caused.”
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