The owner of a Mac repair shop filed a $500 million libel lawsuit against Twitter on Monday, claiming that the platform’s defamed him when it blocked the New York Post’s expose on Hunter Biden.
John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of the shop, was at the center of the pre-election New York Post story that claimed to have obtained emails retrieved from Biden’s laptop. But when the story was published, Twitter locked the Post’s account, saying that it violated its policy on the distribution of hacked material. It also prevented other users from sharing the story.
But Mac Isaac claims that in taking the action, Twitter defamed him, because he is “now widely considered a hacker” and that he “began to receive negative reviews of his business as well as threats to his person and property.”
A Twitter spokesperson said they had no comment.
Mac Isaac’s lawsuit contends that on April 12, 2019, he was asked to recover information from a laptop “allegedly owned” by Biden. The next day, according to the lawsuit, he called Biden to notified him that the data was recovered. An invoice was sent on April 17, but Biden never paid it nor did he retrieve the hard drive. According to the lawsuit, the repair authorization that Biden signed allowed for equipment left at the shop after 90 days to be “treated as abandoned” and the shop would not be held liable for any damage or loss of property.
The lawsuit states that between July of 2019 and Oct. 14, 2020, Mac Isaac had “multiple interactions” with the FBI and Robert Costello, attorney for Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer. The lawsuit does not state how the FBI or Costello were contacted. The Post ran the story “after having received the information from Giuliani,” the lawsuit states, but does not specify how the information was retrieved. Mac Isaac has said that he shared the hard drive with Costello.
Mac Isaac “was unaware that NY Post had information from the hard drive or that a story was going to be published,” the lawsuit states.
The story did not generate the type of mainstream media attention that Trump and his allies had hoped would transpire: smoking gun evidence that Hunter Biden’s father, President-elect Joe Biden, was entangled in his son’s business dealings.
Other publications, including The Wall Street Journal, could not substantiate the claims of corruption, and other outlets said that they were unable to verify authenticity the emails that allegedly came from the laptop.
Hunter Biden said last month that his taxes were the subject of a federal investigation, but that he was “confident that a professional and objective review of these matters will demonstrate that I handled my affairs legally and appropriately, including with the benefit of professional tax advisors.”