Citing 'tampering' claims, judge won’t dismiss Hunter Biden’s laptop lawsuit
Hunter Biden's lawsuit against a former Trump White House aide who distributed the contents of his laptop will proceed in Los Angeles after U.S. District Judge Hernan Vera on Thursday rejected defendant Garrett Ziegler’s motion to dismiss.
“Plaintiff did not sue Defendants for creating a report or website. Defendants are being sued for “accessing, tampering with, manipulating, altering, copying and damaging” Plaintiff’s computer data,” according to the 18-page order, which rejects Ziegler’s lawyer’s argument that the case should be dismissed under California’s anti-SLAPP law.
Judge Vera heard about 70 minutes of argument on May 16 from Biden’s lawyer Paul Salvaty, a partner in Winston Strawn’s LA office, and Garrett Ziegler’s lawyer Robert Tyler of Tyler Law LLP in Murrieta. He’s not yet issued a ruling.
Ziegler’s lawyers last month lost their effort to disqualify Vera, a 2023 Biden appointee who donated to Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign campaign.
“A reasonable person would question whether Judge Vera has a bias in ensuring that President Biden stays in office, given his political contributions to President Biden’s 2020 presidential election campaign and his appointment to the federal court by President Biden just three months before this case was assigned to him,” according to the motion.
In their opposition, Biden’s lawyers said none of the disqualification arguments “come close to supporting the law’s standard for establishing a basis for recusal in this case.”
The motion went to U.S. District Judge Mónica Ramírez Almadan, a 2023 Biden appointee who said in an 11-page order she “is not persuaded that a ‘reasonable person,’ with knowledge of all the facts and circumstances of this case, ‘perceives a significant risk’ that Judge Vera will not resolve the case based solely on the merits.
Coincidentally, Judge Vera also has GOP U.S. Reps. Matt Gaetz’s and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s lawsuit against the City of Anaheim over the cancellation of their rallies in 2021. A jury trial is scheduled for June 2025.
There was a scheduling conference on Tuesday and I saw John Eastman in the courthouse lobby when I went down to photograph Jerry Jones leaving the NFL trial. (It was a really busy moment!)
Eastman, recently disbarred in California over his false election fraud claims and the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol, was filing documents in the case early on but hasn’t filed anything since January.
California State Bar Judge Yvette Roland on May 1 rejected Eastman’s request to continue practicing law while he fights his permanent disbarment, but he still showed up to the scheduling conference with the practicing attorneys on the case, Alexander H. Haberbush and Anthony Caso. Caso represented Eastman in the litigation over his Chapman University emails is not listed as counsel on the minutes.
I didn’t get a chance to go in the courtroom, so I cannot say if Eastman had to watch the proceeding from the gallery.
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