Hunter Biden Laptop Lawsuit Gives Twitter Unpleasant Legal Choices

On Monday, attorneys for the owner of the Delaware-based computer shop who serviced Hunter Biden’s laptop filed suit in a Florida federal district court against Twitter for defamation. John Paul Mac Isaac’s lawsuit alleges Twitter defamed him by labeling him a hacker in an attempt to justify its censorship of The New York Post’s bombshell story exposing the younger Biden selling access to his father.

Three weeks before the 2020 presidential election, The New York Post shook the political landscape by reporting on a trove of emails found on an abandoned MacBook laptop belonging to Hunter Biden. “Hunter Biden discussed leveraging his connection to his father in a bid to boost his pay from a Ukrainian natural gas company, according to an email he sent around the time he joined the firm’s corporate board,” the Post’s Oct. 14, 2020 story opened. “In a lengthy memo to his then-business partner, Devon Archer, who already sat on the Burisma board, Biden repeatedly mentioned ‘my guy,’ while apparently referring to then-Vice President Joe Biden,” the first article in a series continued.

Replete with screen grabs of numerous emails and copies of photographs of Hunter and his family recovered from the laptop, the Post’s story quickly went viral. Quickly, however, Twitter and other social media outlets quashed the news that could have proven fatal to Joe Biden’s presidential aspirations.

Twitter suspended the Post’s account and prevented users from linking to the story in tweets and private massages. Then, seeking to justify its censorship of the Biden story against an avalanche of criticism, Twitter posted a thread clarifying its actions.

After noting the articles included personal and private information, in violation of Twitter’s rules, Twitter noted that it “currently views materials included in the articles as violations of our Hacked Materials Policy.” The social media giant stressed that its “policy only covers links to or images of hacked materials themselves.”