Hunter Biden sued Rudy Giuliani on Tuesday alleging that the former New York mayor and his attorney hacked into his computer data before manipulating and disseminating the information.

Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in the Central District of California. It names as defendants Giuliani, his businesses, his attorney Robert Costello and 10 others whose identities have not yet been determined. 

The lawsuit accuses them of violating the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, California’s Computer Data Access and Fraud Act, and California’s Business and Professional Code. 

In October 2020, the New York Post reported on the contents of a copy of a laptop purportedly left at a Delaware repair shop by Hunter Biden. Giuliani, a personal lawyer for then-President Donald Trump, who was seeking reelection at the time, provided the data to the newspaper. 

The hard drive included damaging material about Hunter Biden’s personal and professional lives. It also including an email suggesting that Hunter Biden arranged for a top executive at the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, whose board the younger Biden served on, to meet with Joe Biden while he was still vice president and in charge of U.S. policy toward Ukraine. Republicans have seized on the email in claiming criminal wrongdoing by the elder Biden. 

President Biden has repeatedly denied having any involvement in his son’s business affairs.

The lawsuit acknowledges that some of the data Giuliani and others obtained belonged to Hunter Biden but claims some data was altered.

“For the past many months and even years, Defendants have dedicated an extraordinary amount of time and energy toward looking for, hacking into, tampering with, manipulating, copying, disseminating, and generally obsessing over data that they were given that was taken or stolen from Plaintiff’s devices or storage platforms, including what Defendants claim to have obtained from Plaintiff’s alleged ‘laptop’ computer,” the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit says  the defendants’ “unlawful activities” have been “established by their own public statements and activities.” 

According to lawsuit, the former owner of the computer repair shop, Mac Isaac, approached Giuliani claiming to possess copies of of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Isaac then shipped an external hard drive to Costello’s home in New York, the suit says.

Costello booted up and logged into the hard drive and typed into Hunter Biden’s username, giving him unauthorized, unlawful access to the information, the complaint alleges.

The lawsuit says Costello has publicly stated he “intentionally tampered with, manipulated, and altered Plaintiff’s data by causing the data to be ‘cleaned up’ from its original form (whatever this means) and by creating ‘a

number of new [digital] folders, with titles like ‘Salacious Pics’ and ‘The Big Guy.’” But it adds that the extent of the defendants’ manipulation is unknown because they have refused to return the data so that it can be analyzed.

Giuliani wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter: "Hunter’s hypothetical and frivolous action fails to allege 'a case or controversy' and should be dismissed for lack of standing with costs and damages to Defendants."

Costello has not responded to an email from Spectrum News seeking comment on the lawsuit.

Hunter Biden is seeking a jury trial, unspecified damages and an injunction barring the defendants and their associates from accessing, tampering with or copying Hunter Biden’s data. The lawsuit claims “their unlawful hacking activities are ongoing today.”

Independent analyses of the authenticity of hard drives said to be copies of Hunter Biden’s laptop have yielded mixed results. 

Two security experts told The Washington Post last year that thousands of emails found on the laptop appear to be authentic, but those emails are only a small fraction of the data on the computer. The vast majority of content could not be verified, and the experts found evidence that people other than Hunter Biden had accessed the drive and written files to it, both before and after the initial Post articles and long after the laptop had been handed over to the FBI in December 2019.

However, a review commissioned by CBS News showed no evidence of tampering or fabrication of data on a copy of the laptop that was provided to federal investigators.