Left: Hunter Biden (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky). Right: Garrett Ziegler (Sky News Australia/YouTube).
Attorneys for Hunter Biden accused the defense of the former Trump administration policy analyst who posted the “Biden Laptop Report” online of employing “non-sequiturs, irrelevant asides, and misstatements of the relevant law” in a bid to avoid having to pay $17,929.40 in attorney’s fees for forcing the computer fraud plaintiff to swat down a motion to dismiss that Biden regards as “frivolous.”
The Thursday filing from Biden’s legal team was a response to Garrett Ziegler’s arguments in opposition that the request for attorney’s fees “should be denied entirely” because the defense motion to dismiss the “hacking” case as a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP suit) under California law was in no way “frivolous,” even if the judge in the case ultimately rejected it.
For the plaintiff, that opposition filing “confirms the frivolous nature of their anti-SLAPP arguments” and the defense of this “frivolity” only racked up “more fees” in the process.
As Law&Crime reported in early August, Ziegler maintains that the failed motion to dismiss 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.
“Plaintiff falsely accuses Defendants of being zealots and obsessed with Plaintiff. Defendants’ only conduct was to research material from a third party which resulted in the publication of the Biden Laptop Report,” Ziegler’s opposition said. “The acts Plaintiff complained of were done in furtherance of Defendants’ right to free speech.”
Biden has now responded that the Ziegler filing was composed of “scattershot arguments to avoid a finding of frivolity” and, at times, made use of “non-sequiturs,” such as: Why haven’t you sued the Washington Examiner and why didn’t you mention the anti-SLAPP motion in a state case that Biden “attorney and financier P. Kevin Morris” filed against Ziegler?
A portion of the Ziegler filing Biden’s reply spoke of.
“Defendants resort to non-sequiturs, arguing, for example, that their motion must not be frivolous because Plaintiff has not sued the Washington Examiner, who purportedly also accessed information from the laptop,” Biden answered. “Defendants also note that a different court, addressing different misconduct by Defendants against a different plaintiff, concluded that Defendants met their first-prong burden on an anti-SLAPP motion in a case where all causes of action were based on Defendants’ speech.”
“Not only are the present case and the Morris Case based on completely different factual allegations and different legal theories,” the response continued, “the trial court in the Morris Case denied Defendants’ anti-SLAPP motion as to all but one of Morris’ claims (which the court dismissed on the grounds it was not a proper cause of action, while acknowledging that the same factual predicate properly supported two other causes of action), based on the plaintiff’s evidence of defendant Ziegler’s extensive misconduct of engaging in harassing speech.”
In closing, Biden asserted that Ziegler’s team ultimately and “repeatedly conced[ed] critical points,” meaning they should be on the hook for the legal fees sought.
“Defendants’ opposition is riddled with non-sequiturs, irrelevant asides, and misstatements of the relevant law, while repeatedly conceding critical points of fact and law regarding the frivolity of their anti-SLAPP motion and the reasonableness of Plaintiff’s fee request,” Biden concluded.
The judge in the case, U.S. District Judge Hernan Vera, was a 2023 appointee of President Joe Biden who three years earlier donated “at least $1,600” to Biden’s 2020 campaign. Ziegler months earlier sought Vera’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.”
Law&Crime sought comment from two of Ziegler’s attorneys of record and will update this story if we receive a response.
Read the Biden reply in support here.
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