In a case certain to test the limits of legal immunity in the digital era, a Delaware shop owner embroiled in the Hunter Biden laptop controversy has filed a $500 million defamation lawsuit against Twitter alleging he was falsely portrayed as a hacker by the social media giant.
John Paul Mac Isaac filed the lawsuit Monday in U.S. District Court in Miami, far from the Wilmington, Del., computer repair shop where he claims that in 2019 a man identifying himself as Hunter Biden dropped off a laptop and never came back to pick it up.
After Mac Isaac turned the laptop over to the FBI and a lawyer working for presidential attorney Rudy Giuliani because he believed it might contain evidence of wrongdoing, he became the focus of media stories, including in the New York Post. Democrats called the laptop Russian disinformation, and Twitter banned stories based on content gleaned from the laptop, suggesting such information violated the social media company’s hacking policy.
U.S. intelligence has said the laptop was not Russian disinformation, and federal authorities have confirmed they took possession of the laptop in December 2019. Hunter Biden recently revealed he is under federal criminal investigation for his tax affairs, though he denies any wrongdoing. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey recently said it was a mistake for his firm to censor the stories.
It was Twitter’s claim that the laptop material violated its hacking policy that triggered Mac Isaac’s lawsuit, which alleges the social media company made several “false and negligent statements.”