CALIFORNIA: Hunter Biden was awarded nearly $18,000 in legal fees by the federal judge in California presiding over his computer fraud case against the former policy analyst for the Trump administration who published the “Biden Laptop Report” online. Biden was required to reply to a motion that was deemed “totally devoid of merit.”
The president’s son has now been awarded $17,929.40 in total by U.S. District Judge Hernan Vera—a 2023 appointee of President Joe Biden—to compensate his lawyers for the billable hours they spent responding to Garrett Ziegler’s “frivolous” motion to dismiss the federal lawsuit as a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP suit) under California law. Ziegler had donated “at least $1,600” to Biden’s 2020 campaign years prior.
After Ziegler received a hard drive from Rudy Giuliani, in 2022, Ziegler posted the “Biden Laptop Report” on the Marco Polo website.
Good faith
Ziegler’s attorneys claimed that the failed motion to toss the case was “not frivolous or solely intended to cause unnecessary delay,” but rather contained “good faith” legal arguments that Biden’s “hacking” lawsuit was filed in retaliation over protected First Amendment activity, with the alleged “goal of chilling Defendants’ free speech rights.”
As associate director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy under former Donald Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro, Ziegler claimed that the “slew of insults” at the start of Biden’s lawsuit exposed the unlawful, “antagonistic” goal of the case: “silencing” him.
Ziegler used “non-sequiturs, irrelevant asides, and misstatements of the relevant law” in the weeks that followed, according to Biden’s attorneys, in an attempt to deflect attention from Vera’s earlier decision that the California anti-SLAPP statute “simply does not apply” to federal claims.
Evidence of bias
Defendants contend that this argument constituted a “small” portion of the motion’s overall length in an effort to downplay its significance. However, word count is not a good indicator of frivolity. It is still the case that the defendants had no legal justification for their apparent attempt to dismiss a federal action through the anti-SLAPP procedures.
Months prior, Ziegler had requested the Biden appointee’s recusal; however, a different federal court hearing the recusal motion determined that the defendant had not proven Vera’s need to recuse herself since there was no “evidence of bias stemming from extrajudicial factors.”
Ziegler allegedly claimed that the outcome was not surprising because Vera had been “appointed by the plaintiff’s daddy[.]” after the judge declined his move to dismiss. Ziegler stated, “[But] we will eventually prevail,” as reported by Newsweek. “No one has accused us of anything other than the truth; all we have done is tell it.”
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