It might be tempting to think Rudy Giuliani’s legal troubles couldn’t get worse, but that assumption isn’t altogether true. Politico reports, for example, that Hunter Biden has sued the former New York City mayor and his lawyer, accusing them of violating state and federal fraud laws “in their efforts to disseminate potentially damaging material.”
Biden, the son of the president, says Giuliani and Costello broke the law when they accessed data they claim came from a laptop sent to them by a computer repairman in Delaware in 2020. Biden does not concede that that claim is true. But he alleges that he is the owner of some of the electronic data obtained by the repairman, and he alleges that Giuliani and Costello’s repeated copying and accessing of that data amounts to an illegal hacking campaign that persists to this day.
“In light of the foregoing illegal activities by Defendants, their refusals to cease and desist in their unlawful behavior, and their apparent intention to continue violating the law in the future, Plaintiff has no alternative but to commence this lawsuit,” Hunter Biden’s attorneys wrote in the newly filed federal lawsuit.
The Politico report added that while Giuliani and his associates have made the case in recent years that the purported laptop was allegedly abandoned, which made its contents fair game, the new lawsuit argues that Hunter Biden’s data still belongs to him.
A member of his legal team argued, “If you take your coat to the dry cleaner and leave your wallet in it, and you forget to pick it up, it doesn’t mean the dry cleaner gets the wallet and all your money. It’s just common sense.”
Time will tell, of course, whether the lawsuit succeeds, but either way, it creates yet another headache for the troubled Republican lawyer. Indeed, it comes against a backdrop of groping allegations raised by Cassidy Hutchinson, a former top aide to ex-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, whose new book is now available.
Those claims, which Giuliani denied, came just days before his own former lawyers sued him, claiming that the former mayor owes them $1.36 million in unpaid legal fees.
Those developments came just three weeks after NBC News reported that a federal judge ruled that Giuliani defamed former Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, and is liable for damages after he failed to comply with discovery obligations in their defamation lawsuit.
My MSNBC colleague Jordan Rubin added that there will still be a trial later this year, but the question at trial “won’t be whether he’s liable but how much he has to pay the plaintiffs.”
Two weeks before that, Giuliani was indicted in Georgia as part of the broader case related to Team Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.
A month earlier, a Washington, D.C.-based bar discipline committee concluded that Giuliani should be disbarred for “frivolous” and “destructive” efforts to derail the 2020 election.
For good measure, let’s also not forget that Giuliani has also received attention from special counsel Jack Smith’s office, and he’s facing a credible defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems.
It’s possible that the Republican lawyer is pondering his options right now, wondering if there’s a way out of these cascading messes. But as we discussed last week, a list like this is not easily overcome.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
