A legal team representing President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden has filed court documents seeking to prosecute the former Trump administration aide accusing him of violating data access laws in California.
The lawsuit stems from the leak of personal data from a laptop owned by the president’s son.
In court documents, Garrett Ziegler, a former aide to Trump administration trade adviser Peter Navarro, has been charged with violating California’s computer fraud and data access laws.
Ziegler and other co-defendants, who have not been explicitly named in court, are alleged to have gained access to “thousands” of emails and numerous videos and other recordings.
The lawsuit accuses the defendants of taking that data and spreading it across the Internet.
Biden’s lawyers say Ziegler has devoted much of his waking time and energy since leaving the White House to accessing, tampering with, manipulating, altering, copying and otherwise using the laptop’s data.
“Within the past two weeks,” Hunter’s attorneys wrote, “Defendant Ziegler has gone so far as to declare on social media that any future attempts by Plaintiff to provide him with legal process will be met with violence.”
According to court documents, lawyers say the defendant wrote, “If the son of the President of the United States sends a proxy [i.e., a process server] I’ll blow their fucking brains out for trespassing on my property.”
Politico reported that Ziegler has used his nonprofit group Marco Polo to talk about his work by sharing material from a hard drive said to have once been in the possession of Hunter Biden. Was in.
Politco reported it had received a statement from Ziegler in which he claimed no lawsuit had been filed against him as of the time the outlet reported on it on Wednesday. The former Trump administration aide said he had read about the threat of a lawsuit, the outlet reported. “It’s not worth the paper it’s written on,” Ziegler said in the statement.
On Tuesday, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy directed the House to launch an investigation to review President Biden’s interactions with his son Hunter and his business dealings.
McCarthy spoke about the inquiry into X, formerly known as Twitter, on Wednesday morning in a reported effort to help ease the concerns of some Republican Party members, saying it was not a political stunt.