He Says He’s Got Hunter Biden’s Laptop So He Sues Twitter For $500 Million
The October surprise of the 2020 election was supposed to be Hunter Biden’s purported laptop, which supposedly showed incriminating emails. The big front-page story in the New York Post was about a message to Hunter from a Ukraine gas company executive, who thanked him for arranging a meeting with Joe Biden in 2015. This was supposed to refute a claim by the former Vice President that he never discussed his son’s business. Joe Biden’s people said there was no record of any such meeting, and voters’ attention seemed to be elsewhere.
The provenance of the laptop and veracity of the emails looked dodgy to the censors at Twitter, who decided to block dissemination of the New York Post story, citing their policy against “distribution of hacked material.”
Others shared Twitter’s doubts. The Post reporter working on the story refused to let his name be used on the byline. About 50 U.S. intelligence professionals said the email release looked, sounded and smelled like a product of Russian disinformation.
But the laptop news opened the floodgates to other Hunter Biden stories touted by right wing media and largely ignored by mainstream outlets. True to form, right wingers derided Twitter and others who demanded more fact checking. They ascribed the hesitation to liberal bias and big tech censorship.
More recently, the source of the famous laptop, John Paul Mac Isaac, who ran a computer repair shop in Delaware, tried to sue Twitter for $500 million. “Being labeled a hacker is a death sentence in my industry,” he says. “And I was just trying to do the right thing.”
For Mac Isaac to prevail in court, he must show that Twitter’s statement was “of and concerning” him. He says in his complaint, “Defendant’s actions and statements had the specific intent to communicate to the world that Plaintiff is a hacker.” That’s quite a stretch, to put it charitably.
Twitter blocked the story because the Post story referred an unnamed computer shop repair owner in Delaware who wasn’t sure who dropped off the laptop with the incriminating contents, though he strongly suspected it was Hunter Biden. The story implies that the owner of the laptop abandoned it, so that the computer shop repairman may have been within his rights to copy the hard drive and share the contents with others. Clearly, Twitter didn’t know with certainty that the emails were hacked, only that it seemed likely that they were misappropriated. Mac Isaac says he didn’t want to be identified; but as soon as the Post story came out, he started giving interviews to other media outlets. The Daily Beast said their interview was bizarre.
Mac Isaac says that the terms printed on the repair invoice show that he’s entitled to take control of the laptop and its contents if the customer hasn’t paid his $85 bill after 90 days. So he was entirely within his rights to appropriate and disseminate the laptop contents. And so Twitter, by citing its anti-hacking policy to block a New York Post story that doesn’t name him, effectively defamed Mac Isaac by implying he’s a hacker.
He can’t claim that Twitter acted on purpose, only that it acted negligently because it did not figure out that the New York Post article implicitly identified Mac Isaac, and it did not figure out that Mac Isaac was within his legal rights to disseminate the laptop contents. And such negligence led people who — upon seeing the Twitter statement decided to seek out the New York Post article elsewhere and then figured out that the unnamed computer guy was Mac Isaac — would then draw the wrong inference that he was a hacker, when in fact he was just an ordinary guy who felt President Trump’s people should know what the former Vice President’s son was up to.
(In his complaint Mac Isaac says the New York Post identified his shop with a photograph, though that photo was published days after October 14, 2020, when the Post published the original article, Twitter blocked it, and Mac Isaac identified himself by talking to the media.)
And for those negligent acts, Mac Isaac’s lawyers say Twitter should pay $500 million in punitive damages. Generally speaking, you can only collect punitive damages for negligent acts that are willful, wanton or reckless. This type of negligence doesn’t seem to fit the bill.
As for actual damages, Mac Isaac would have to demonstrate causation. Did he lose customers because Twitter implied that he was a hacker? Or because people might think he’s a busybody should should have wiped the hard drive clean and sold the laptop to recover his fee instead of spending 15 months trying to contact government officials after eavesdropping on somebody else’s private messages?
The $500 million lawsuit landed Mac Isaac on Fox News, which pointed out the case was dismissed on “a technicality.” Mac Isaac, a resident of Delaware, filed a suit against Twitter, a Delaware corporation, for a violation of state law in Federal court in Florida. You can’t bring a state law grievance into Federal court unless you show diversity jurisdiction, two parties from two different states. Mac Isaac’s lawyer, who practices in Maryland, said on Fox that they planned to fix that problem.
It’s not like Mac Isaac is doing anything for the publicity or anything. “I needed to get this to the proper authorities,” he said. “And when I felt like the proper authorities failed me, and I exhausted every opportunity to get this to the right people and people who would hear my story the last person on the list then that gives me the opportunity to get that to the people. And the last person on the list was lawyers or the President.”
Sounds like we haven’t heard the last of Mac Isaac. Not so long as certain media outlets are eager to give his narrative oxygen.
