Hunter Biden (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite), Garrett Ziegler talks Hunter Biden on YouTube (YouTube/Reporter.London screengrab)
President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden responded to a motion to dismiss his California-based federal “hacking” lawsuit on Thursday by saying a former policy analyst in the Trump White House offered up a “surprisingly frank admission” in a sworn declaration that “proves Defendants’ unlawful data access as a matter of law.”
While Garrett Ziegler, the company Marco Polo, and 10 Does in December asserted the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) lawsuit is actually a strategic lawsuit against public participation which should be thrown out for seeking to chill “protected” First Amendment activity, Hunter Biden has countered that he’s suing the defendants “for their unlawful and unauthorized access to data, not for their use of the data to engage in data-related speech.”
The filing began by casting Ziegler’s own description of his actions under oath as enough proof to survive the motion to dismiss.
“Defendants present a sworn declaration from Ziegler in which he admits under oath—perhaps without realizing the consequences of doing so—that Defendants spent months ‘locating’ Plaintiff’s passwords and then used one or more of those passwords to access Plaintiff’s password-protected data,” the opposition said, before quoting Ziegler’s “surprisingly frank admission”:
Also contained on the external hard drive given to me were files containing passcodes, which are essentially similar in function to passwords designed to allow access to password-protected files. Although it took months of examination, we were able to locate the passcode which allowed access to the iPhone backup file. Those files existed on the external hard drive when it was first given to me.
Biden’s lawyers argued that the defendants engaged in “precisely the type of ‘hacking’ activity that the statutes are intended to punish.”
In addition, Ziegler, who also worked for former Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro as associate director in the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, openly “bragged” that he and defendants got into Hunter Biden’s “iPhone backup” and “cracked the encrypted code that was stored on his laptop,” the filing said.
“After ‘cracking the encrypted code that was stored on [Plaintiff’s] laptop,’ Defendants illegally accessed the data and then uploaded it to their website, where it remains accessible to this day,” the Biden opposition continued. “It appears that data Defendants uploaded to their website from Plaintiff’s encrypted ‘iPhone backup,’ like data Defendants uploaded from their copy of the hard drive of the purported ‘laptop,’ has been manipulated, tampered with, altered, and/or damaged by Defendants.”
Calling the evidence “ample,” the high-profile plaintiff again asserted that Ziegler’s “sworn testimony” should come back to haunt him.
“The evidence available to date indicates that, through means that are not entirely clear, Defendants came to possess data belonging to Plaintiff. After gaining possession of Plaintiff’s data, Defendants proceeded to access the data without Plaintiff’s authorization or consent. Defendants’ activities included locating Plaintiff’s password and using the password to gain access to Plaintiff’s password-protected data. Plaintiff never authorized or consented to Defendants’ activities,” the filing concluded. “To the contrary, Plaintiff demanded that Defendants cease and desist their unlawful activities, but this demand has been ignored. Defendants have refused to cease or desist and continuously have accessed, tampered with, and manipulated data belonging to Plaintiff, as proven by Defendant Ziegler’s own sworn testimony in this case.”
Read Hunter Biden’s opposition to the MTD here.
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