- John Paul Mac Isaac, the laptop repairman behind the dubious New York Post exposure on Hunter Biden, sued Twitter for defamation on Monday.
- Isaac claims that Twitter falsely portrayed him as a hacker by banning Post tweets about his story, based on a Twitter policy against sharing hacked material.
- Isaac said the scandal prompted him to close his deal and that he is asking the court to award him $ 500 million in punitive damages.
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The laptop repairman at the center of the New York Post’s controversial Hunter Biden complaint is suing Twitter for defamation, saying the social media giant hinted that he was a hacker and caused him to lose his business.
The front page of the New York Post the day after Twitter censored the newspaper’s tweets about its dubious Hunter Biden exposure.
The New York Post
John Paul Mac Isaac explains in his lawsuit, opened on Monday in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida and seen by Business Insider, who was hired to repair Biden’s laptop in April 2019, but Biden never came get the device, despite Isaac reaching out to him at least twice.
Isaac subsequently handed the device over to the FBI and shared a copy of the hard drive with Robert Costello, a personal lawyer for Rudy Giuliani – personal lawyer for President Donald Trump, the Post reported in its complaint. It was Giuliani who provided the Post with laptop information about Biden’s history and his dealings with Ukraine.
Shortly after the Post published its story, Twitter suspended the newspaper’s Twitter account and prevented people from tweeting the story, citing a policy against “distributing hacked material”.
But Isaac says the information for the story did not come from hacked material. He says it was obtained because the computer was abandoned to him.
“The Claimant, as a direct result of the Defendant’s actions and statements, is now widely considered a hacker and, on the same day that the Defendant categorized the Claimant as a hacker, the Claimant began to receive negative assessments of his business, as well as threats to your person and property “, states the process.
Later, Twitter disabled the Post’s Twitter account, and allowed discussion of the story – albeit with added contextual labels.
But Isaac said the damage was done. He said he had to close his deal “as a direct result” of Twitter’s “false statements”.
Isaac is asking the court to award him $ 500 million in punitive damages and to force Twitter to “publicly retract all false statements”.
The Post story stated that Hunter Biden used his influential father to forge business ties in Ukraine, but the story had several gaps and many questions were raised about the origin of the laptop, as well as the timing of the complaint shortly before the 2020 election.
More than 50 former intelligence officers signed a letter in October, saying the Post’s story has “all the classic marks of a Russian intelligence operation”, but Trump’s spy chief said there is no evidence that the laptop ” was part of a Russian disinformation campaign. “