Left: Hunter Biden (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite). Right: Garrett Ziegler talks Hunter Biden on YouTube (YouTube/Reporter.London).
The federal judge in California overseeing Hunter Biden’s computer fraud lawsuit against the former Trump administration policy analyst who posted the “Biden Laptop Report” online has granted Biden close to $18,000 in attorney’s fees for having to respond to a motion that was “totally devoid of merit.”
U.S. District Judge Hernan Vera, a 2023 appointee of President Joe Biden who years earlier donated “at least $1,600” to Biden’s 2020 campaign, has now awarded the president’s son $17,929.40 total to compensate his lawyers for the billable hours they spent answering Garrett Ziegler’s “frivolous” motion to dismiss the federal lawsuit as a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP suit) under California law.
The fee award is exactly the number that the plaintiff’s attorneys sought, an amount Vera said was “reasonable.”
As Law&Crime reported in early August, Ziegler’s attorneys asserted that the failed motion to toss the case was “not frivolous or solely intended to cause unnecessary delay,” but rather contained “good faith” legal arguments that Biden’s “hacking” lawsuit was filed to retaliate over protected First Amendment activity — with the alleged “goal of chilling Defendants’ free speech rights” for posting the “Biden Laptop Report” on the Marco Polo website in 2022 after Ziegler receiving a hard drive from Rudy Giuliani.
Ziegler, who worked for former Donald Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro as associate director in the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, argued that the “slew of insults” at the very top of Biden’s lawsuit revealed the improper, “antagonistic” purpose of the lawsuit: “silencing” him.
In the weeks that followed, Biden’s attorneys said Ziegler had filed “scattershot arguments to avoid a finding of frivolity” and resorted to “non-sequiturs, irrelevant asides, and misstatements of the relevant law” to draw attention away from Vera’s prior ruling that the California anti-SLAPP statute “simply does not apply” to federal claims.
On Monday, Vera said Biden “amply met” the standard for showing that Ziegler’s motion — “totally devoid of merit” — was “frivolous” or “solely intended to cause unnecessary delay.”
“To guard against these pernicious suits, the California Code of Civil Procedure provides an ‘anti-SLAPP’ mechanism whereby a litigant can bring a special motion to strike any cause of action ‘arising from any act of that person in furtherance of the person’s right of petition or free speech under the United States Constitution or the California Constitution in connection with a public issue,”” Vera explained. “But a frivolous anti-SLAPP motion has consequences too.”
Writing that there “can be no dispute” that Ziegler’s attempt to toss the computer fraud suit was completely meritless, the judge repeated that “[b]lack letter law is crystal clear that an anti-SLAPP motion cannot be used against a federal cause of action.”
“And where—as here—the result of an anti-SLAPP motion is obvious, and the argument made in its favor is pellucidly without merit, it is frivolous,” Vera added.
In a footnote, the judge emphasized that “frivolousness is not measured by word count”:
Defendants attempt to minimize the importance of this argument by arguing that it was a “small” part of the overall length of the motion. But frivolousness is not measured by word count. The fact remains that Defendants patently sought to use the anti-SLAPP procedures to dismiss a federal claim, and there was absolutely no legal basis to do so.
Ziegler months earlier sought the Biden appointee’s recusal, but another federal judge who handled the recusal motion ruled that the defendant had failed to show that Vera had to step aside, as there was no “evidence of bias stemming from extrajudicial factors.”
After the judge denied his motion to dismiss, Ziegler reportedly said the result was no surprise given that Vera was “appointed by the plaintiff’s daddy[.]”
“[B]ut we will eventually prevail,” Ziegler said, according to Newsweek. “All we’ve done is tell the truth, and no one has accused us otherwise.”
Read the order here.
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