Joe Biden
WILMINGTON, Del. – The computer-repair shop owner who turned over Hunter Biden’s laptop has lost claims he was defamed in the press and by former President Joe Biden when they publicly suggested Russian disinformation was the source.
The Delaware Supreme Court on Monday dismissed a lawsuit brought by John Paul Mac Isaac, who was left in possession of Hunter’s laptop in 2019 after recovering data from a damaged laptop. Hunter never came back for it, and Mac Isaac alerted the FBI about information on it regarding then-Vice President Joe Biden’s business dealings with Ukraine.
With Trump in office for his first term and during impeachment hearings, Mac Isaac sent the information to a lawyer for Rudy Guiliani but maintained he wanted to remain anonymous. That didn’t happen once the New York Post published a story on the laptop that led other media outlets to discover his identity.
He sued Politico over an October 2020 article titled “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.” He sued the Biden presidential campaign committee for claiming the laptop story was “a Russian disinformation operation.”
“For starters, the article’s headline, which is the only part of the publication identified by Mac Isaac as false and defamatory, does not mention Mac Isaac or provide any information from which a reader might think that Mac Isaac was a participant in a “Russian information operation,’” Justice Gary Traynor wrote.
“And the only statement in the article below the headline ‘of and concerning’ Mac Isaac was that he initiated the chain of events that led to the laptop landing in the hands of Rudy Guiliani.”
Though Mac Isaac argued the headline must be read in isolation, the only way a reader would know he was involved would be to read the copy of the story, Traynor wrote.
He also failed to show Biden defamed him during an interview with CBS, the court added. At issue was Biden neither confirming nor denying he owned the laptop and offering the possibilities that it could have been stolen or hacked – or be a Russian ploy.
“To say that Biden’s statements were ‘of and concerning’ Mac Isaac is, to be charitable, a stretch,” Traynor wrote.
“As with the Politico article, Mac Isaac was not mentioned during the CBS interview. And once again he fails to explain why a viewer would understand from Biden’s comments that he was the malefactor who possibly stole or hacked the laptop or that he was complicit in a Russian disinformation scheme.”
Biden had filed an invasion-of-privacy counterclaim against Mac Isaac, but the lower court and the Supreme Court both found it was filed outside of the two-year statute of limitations.
