Garrett Ziegler talks Hunter Biden on YouTube (YouTube/Reporter.London screengrab); Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden, speaks during a news conference outside the Capitol, Dec. 13, 2023, in Washington (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib, File).
After a federal judge refused to throw out Hunter Biden’s “hacking” lawsuit against a former policy analyst in Donald Trump’s White House, President Joe Biden’s son is demanding close to $18,000 in attorney’s fees for having to a fight a part of the defeated motion to dismiss that he calls “frivolous.”
In June, Garrett Ziegler, who previously worked for former Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro as associate director in the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, lost his attempt to toss out Biden’s California-based computer fraud suit over the posting of the “Biden Laptop Report” on the website Marco Polo.
The non-dismissal took place months after Ziegler failed to secure the recusal of U.S. District Judge Hernan Vera, a 2023 appointee of President Biden who three years earlier donated “at least $1,600” to Biden’s 2020 campaign. Another federal judge who handled the recusal motion ruled that Ziegler had failed to show that Vera had to step aside, as there was no “evidence of bias stemming from extrajudicial factors.”
The facts of Vera’s appointment by President Biden and the judge’s prior Biden campaign donations “alone and together do not warrant disqualification,” U.S. District Judge Monica Ramirez Almadani ruled.
Months later, Vera decided that Ziegler must face Hunter Biden’s lawsuit, since the plaintiff “sufficiently alleged the necessary elements of his claims for [sic] under federal and state computer fraud statutes.”
Biden has claimed that Ziegler 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,” culminating in the “Biden Laptop Report.”
In one part of the denial, Vera made quick work of Ziegler’s claims that Biden’s case amounted to a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP suit) under California law.
What Hunter Biden calls illegal “hacking” and data manipulation, Ziegler has defended as the exercise of protected First Amendment activity, through the publication of “information, media, and emails originating from the files of the infamous ‘Biden Laptop.””
Under Ziegler’s theory, Biden’s lawsuit should have been thrown out in its entirety for trying to chill speech through retaliatory litigation.
But the judge was not at all swayed by this argument.
“The anti-SLAPP statute simply does not apply” to federal claims, Vera wrote. “Were it otherwise, every data hack of a public figure would be fair game. That is not what California’s anti-SLAPP allows.”
While Vera’s dismissal did not refer to Ziegler’s attempt to dismiss on this ground as “frivolous,” Biden attorney Gregory Ellis contends that is exactly what it was — and for that reason, he’s demanding $17,929.40 in attorney’s fees (the judge did say the “anti-SLAPP argument lacks merit”).
“Even after Plaintiff identified controlling case law showing the anti-SLAPP statute does not apply to federal claims, Defendants continued to pursue their anti-SLAPP motion as to all causes of action, including the CFAA claim, forcing Plaintiff to waste time and resources addressing anti-SLAPP arguments that were completely baseless,” the Biden filing said. “Because Defendants’ anti-SLAPP arguments were contrary both to the allegations of Plaintiff’s complaint and settled Ninth Circuit law, the Court should find their anti-SLAPP motion to be ‘frivolous and/or ‘solely intended to cause unnecessary delay.’”
Biden’s attorneys are calling for an Aug. 22 hearing on the issue.
After the judge denied the 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 Biden motion for attorney’s fees here.
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