Hunter Biden Is Suing Laptop Repairman

Hunter Biden's lawyers have filed counterclaims against a Delaware computer repairman who says the president's son left a laptop at his store in April 2019 and never returned to reclaim it. The lawyers are challenging John Paul Mac Isaac's claim that the laptop and an external hard drive became his property after Biden didn't pick it up within 90 days, ABC reports. The 90-day limit was in the fine print of the repair agreement Biden allegedly signed, but his lawyers say that under Delaware law, personal property is not "deemed abandoned" until the rightful owner has failed to "assert or declare property rights to the property for a period of 1 year."

The countersuit, a response to a defamation lawsuit filed by Mac Isaac last year, accuses Mac Isaac of sharing "sensitive, private material" with "political enemies" because he opposed Joe Biden's candidacy. Materials allegedly from the laptop, including private emails and sexually explicit videos, have appeared in the media, including emails the New York Post reported on weeks before the 2020 election, CNN reports. "The object of invading Mr. Biden’s privacy and disseminating his data was not for any legitimate purpose but to cause harm and embarrassment to Mr. Biden," the lawsuit states. It states "any reasonable person" would not "expect a computer repairman to copy and disseminate the private and confidential contents of someone’s data."

In the countersuit, Hunter Biden does not acknowledge that the laptop belonged to him, though he admits that some of the data shared was his, the Washington Post reports. He has previously said that he was struggling with drug addiction at the time he allegedly dropped it off and his memory may not be reliable. "This is not an admission by Mr. Biden that Mac Isaac (or others) in fact possessed any particular laptop containing electronically stored data belonging to Mr. Biden,” the filing says. “Rather, Mr. Biden simply acknowledges that at some point, Mac Isaac obtained electronically stored data, some of which belonged to Mr. Biden." The countersuit, which seeks a jury trial and compensatory damages, is part of an aggressive new strategy from Biden's legal team. (More Hunter Biden stories.)