Hunter Biden Accused Rudy Giuliani of Hacking His Data, Not Defamation
Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss’ civil trial against Rudy Giuliani goes to trial tomorrow.
In a number of the scene setters for the trial, people are making claims like this:
In addition to his criminal charges, disbarment proceedings and the lawsuit brought by Freeman and Moss, Giuliani has been sued by various other individuals — including President Joe Biden’s son Hunter — who claim he spread false allegations about them in 2020.
He and one of his lawyers are being sued by Hunter Biden for allegedly mishandling the presidential son’s laptop,
Hunter Biden is not suing Robert Costello and Rudy Giuliani for defamation. He’s not suing Robert Costello and Rudy Giuliani for mishandling “his laptop,” which (even if John Paul Mac Isaac and Rudy Giuliani have told the truth about everything) would never have been in Rudy’s possession.
Hunter Biden is suing the former President’s former personal lawyer and that lawyer’s former personal lawyer for hacking his data. Hunter Biden is suing Rudy for violating the criminal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act: for accessing a computer without authorization or exceeding authorized access.
41. Defendants have violated the CFAA, specifically section 1030(a)(2)(C) of
the CFAA, by intentionally accessing a computer without authorization or exceeding
authorized access, and thereby obtaining information from any protected computer
which, pursuant to the CFAA, is a computer used in or affecting interstate commerce
or communication.42. Defendants have violated the CFAA, specifically section 1030(a)(4) of the
CFAA, by knowingly and with intent to defraud, accessing a protected computer
without authorization or exceeding authorized access, and by means of such conduct
furthering the intended fraud and obtaining one or more things of value.
We will have to wait to see whether he can prove that claim. But particularly given that Hunter has since been charged with 12 criminal charges by a US Attorney appointed by Trump, let’s be clear what the claim is.
Hunter Biden has accused Rudy Giuliani of violating the criminal hacking statute.
One reason people make this mistake all the time — on top of the non-stop Fox News propaganda about this — is they think of the laptop like this:
The laptop, as it was brought to John Paul Mac Isaac’s shop, is better thought of like this.
There were dick pics on the laptop (I’m using artistic license in my choice of dick pics).
There were emails, including emails hosted by Google and emails tied to Hunter Biden’s iCloud account. But the laptop also included on it the means to get into Hunter’s iCloud account and at least some of his Google accounts.
There were other digital keys on the laptop and probably enough bank data to get into financial accounts.
And there was the contents of an iPhone, stored in encrypted form. As I’ve described, I first went down this rabbit hole — the entire Hunter Biden rabbit hole — when I read Gary Shapley’s description that the FBI needed a password to access some of the content, the content from the phone, on what was an actual laptop. That’s when I realized that anyone who accessed the encrypted contents of that phone without a warrant might be at risk for CFAA charges.
Several of the people who’ve been offering up Hunter Biden data confess, openly, that they broke the encryption on that phone.
In other words, no matter how all that stuff got put onto Hunter’s laptop, and no matter how it got brought to John Paul Mac Isaac’s shop, and no matter whether JPMI was perfectly in his legal rights to take possession of the laptop itself — all things that are very much contested — the laptop included the means to get into other data, data hosted in the cloud, to which neither JPMI nor anyone else had authorized access.
And then the blind computer repair man, after having chosen to copy that hard drive that, contrary to his claims was a removable hard drive, by cutting and pasting it and reading it along the way, packaged that all up on a hard drive and sent it, without Hunter’s consent, to the then-President’s lawyer.
We don’t know what kind of hard drive JPMI used — he said he constructed his own, to make it untraceable.
Instead of buying external drives from a local store, where the purchase might be traced back to me, or online, which also could be traced and moreover might lead to damage in transit, I built my own.
It took about a week to collect all the pieces and clone the drive from the store’s backup server. In essence, I created a copy that was as close to the original drive as possible.
As I have shown, at a time when Rudy says he (or Robert Costello) were in possession of that hard drive that had on it means to access several of Hunter’s cloud accounts, an email Hunter sent in 2016 was resent, showing some alterations.
Hunter Biden is not accusing Rudy Giuliani of saying things about him that aren’t true. Hunter Biden is accusing Rudy Giuliani of accessing data — whether on a hard drive copied from a laptop or in the cloud — to which he did not have legal access.