Hunter Biden (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite), Garrett Ziegler talks Hunter Biden on YouTube (YouTube/Reporter.London screengrab)
A California federal judge who donated to President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, went on to be appointed to the court three years later, and subsequently survived an attempt to force his recusal from Hunter Biden’s “hacking” lawsuit, refused on Thursday to throw out a computer fraud case against a former policy analyst in the Trump White House who posted the “Biden Laptop Report” online.
U.S. District Judge Hernan Vera found that the president’s son, now a convicted felon, at the motion to dismiss stage of the suit against Garrett Ziegler has “sufficiently alleged the necessary elements of his claims for [sic] under federal and state computer fraud statutes.”
In April, U.S. District Judge Monica Ramirez Almadani, another federal judge in California who handled Ziegler’s recusal motion, concluded that Vera did not need to step aside from the case, viewing it as similar in nature to recently convicted felon former President Donald Trump’s failures in his unsuccessful Trump v. Clinton RICO suit to secure the recusal of a Bill Clinton-appointed jurist.
Ziegler had argued that the political “subject matter” of Hunter Biden’s lawsuit and Vera’s donation of “at least $1,600” to the 2020 campaign of the plaintiff’s father were more than enough to require recusal, given reasonable questions about whether the judge could be impartial amid the backdrop of House Republicans’ impeachment inquiry.
But Almadani said the defendants, including Ziegler and his company ICU LLC, doing business as the Marco Polo website which posted the “Biden Laptop Report,” did not show “any evidence of bias” on Vera’s part “stemming from extrajudicial factors.”
Ziegler, who previously worked for former Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro as associate director in the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, was sued by Hunter Biden last September for allegedly “hacking into” an “encrypted iPhone backup.”
Biden alleged that Ziegler, whom he called a “zealot,” and ICU LLC engaged in “illegal activities to advance his right-wing agenda” and “waged a sustained, unhinged and obsessed campaign against Plaintiff and the entire Biden family for more than two years.”
That, Biden alleged, resulted in the “accessing, tampering with, manipulating, altering, copying and damaging computer data that they do not own and that they claim to have obtained from hacking into Plaintiff’s iPhone data and from scouring a copy of the hard drive of what they claim to be Plaintiff’s ‘laptop’ computer.”
Ziegler, calling the suit an impermissible retaliatory Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP suit) under California law, attempted to make the case that the plaintiff was lashing out and seeking to punish the exercise of protected First Amendment activity, namely the publication of “information, media, and emails originating from the files of the infamous ‘Biden Laptop.’”
But unfortunately for the defendants, Vera on Thursday rejected Ziegler’s challenges of jurisdiction, standing, and venue. Nor did the judge find that Biden failed to state a claim under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
In closing, Vera said defense anti-SLAPP arguments also fell flat for a simple and straightforward reason.
“The anti-SLAPP statute simply does not apply” to federal claims, the judge said. “Were it otherwise, every data hack of a public figure would be fair game. That is not what California’s anti-SLAPP allows.”
Read the order here.
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