Hunter Biden has won a bid to drop his laptop hacking lawsuit because of money problems, but he can’t bring the case again in the future, a judge has ruled.
California federal Judge Hernán Vera Thursday partially granted the request by Biden, 55, to dismiss his case against former White House aide Garrett Ziegler after Biden claimed he can’t get out of debt because no one is buying his memoir and art and because he and his family were forced to relocate from their posh Malibu rental home after the wildfires.
The Post exclusively revealed photos last week showing Hunter’s home appearing unscathed while all the surrounding houses appeared destroyed by the Pacific Palisade fires that raged in January.
It was unclear whether there was unseen damage inside the house.
Ziegler – an aide to trade adviser Peter Navarro during the first Trump administration – tried to fight the case against him getting dropped so he could go after the Biden scion for legal fees.
While Vera agreed to close the case, the judge shot down Hunter’s effort to keep things open-ended, denying him the potential to ever file the case again.
Since Ziegler’s lawyers already turned over papers they planned to file, which included their main defense — while Hunter’s side had not yet shared the strategy of their case — Ziegler would be unfairly penalized if Hunter were to refile the suit, Vera said.
Ziegler’s motion “gives [Hunter Biden] a roadmap to [Ziegler’s] most important legal arguments, and provides prejudicial advantage given that [Biden] has not yet had to file an opposition,” Vera wrote.
Also, if the judge allowed Biden to bring the case again, it “would give him additional time to prepare for deposition with the information gleaned from [Ziegler’s] recent briefing,” Vera explained.
Hunter had been scheduled to be deposed on March 10 by Ziegler – whom he claimed illegally hacked his infamous laptop and shared its embarrassing contents on his conservative non-profit site Marco Polo.
Mere days before Hunter was due to give sworn testimony during a grilling by Ziegler’s lawyers, he unexpectedly asked for the case to be dismissed.
Ziegler’s lawyers have since speculated that Hunter was exaggerating the urgency of his financial problems and that he may have wanted to drop the case because he couldn’t make the deposition since he might be taking a three-month trip to South Africa, the native country of his wife, Melissa Cohen.
Ziegler’s lawyers said they didn’t have confirmation of whether the trip was actually happening.
The embattled former first son was convicted in two criminal cases last year.
In the first case, a jury found him guilty of illegally owning a gun while using drugs, and he pleaded guilty in the second case to evading taxes. He faced decades behind bars before his dad swooped in to pardon him before leaving office.
Lawyers for Hunter and Ziegler didn’t immediately return requests for comment Friday morning.
