Hunter Biden Sues Marco Polo Founder for Publishing 128K Emails from Abandoned Laptop

Hunter Biden filed a civil lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for Central California on Wednesday against nonprofit Marco Polo’s founder, Garrett Ziegler, for publishing 128,000 indexed emails from his abandoned “Laptop from Hell.”

Marco Polo issued a digital indexed dossier in October entitled, “Report on the Biden Laptop,” complete with cited timelines, entities, transactions, emails, videos, texts, and photos of the Biden family. The dossier boasts 128,000 emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop, which was abandoned in a Delaware computer repair store.

Has anyone looked into Delaware's law on abandoned property? I have no doubt that the lienholder can sell the hardware, but is the data included or is it a separate item under the law? For example, if Steven King pulls a Hunter with his computer, can the store owner claim ownership of the just completed novel on it?

Second, I wonder if Hunter intentionally left the laptop in anticipation of it being wiped clean and sold as a used computer. That way, if called to testify about it he could "honestly" claim that he didn't erase it.

"....Has anyone looked into Delaware's law on abandoned property? I have no doubt that the lienholder can sell the hardware, but is the data included or is it a separate item under the law? For example, if Steven King pulls a Hunter with his computer, can the store owner claim ownership of the just completed novel on it?

Second, I wonder if Hunter intentionally left the laptop in anticipation of it being wiped clean and sold as a used computer. That way, if called to testify about it he could “honestly” claim that he didn't erase it....."

I am not going to spend time looking up Delaware laws. Also, I doubt that a jury will buy the idea that there is a presumption that the hard drive would be erased unless the repair shop says so.

As to a noted author's unpublished novel, I think that is a copyright question and would depend upon if the author was credited with his intellectual property. I think in the case at hand, it is clear that the words are those of Hunter Biden.

Again, most computer repair places I have taken computers to have huge legal forms, I must sign that absolve the repair shop of all kinds of things.

You read all the time about computer repair shops turning in pedophiles for child pornography because of pictures they find on the computer. I doubt any pedophile will win a claim that his computer information was released without his permission.

Marco Polo made it clear who was the author and what were the author's own words. The issue in my mind if I were a juror is did Hunter have a right to privacy on a computer that he abandoned and became the property of someone else?

When I have sold or recycled computers, I have always pulled the hard drive and drilled holes in it to protect financial data like old tax returns and banking information and passwords. Hunter was a drug addicted fool.

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