Trump White House aide Garrett Ziegler is seeking the dismissal of a civil lawsuit filed against him by Hunter Biden.
Ziegler founded the grassroots-funded Marco Polo investigative group which compiled an exacting analysis and database of the Hunter Biden laptop from hell which is available to the public online and as a bound volume.
Ziegler, who said the first son's very well-funded bid to intimidate him is based on "half-baked legal challenges," filed a motion for a federal judge in the Central District of California to dismiss the case.
Unaccustomed to old fashioned journalistic scrutiny, Team Biden had reason to be concerned.
More than revealing degenerate behavior by the First Son, as documented on the laptop by Biden himself, Marco Polo's 'Report On The Biden Laptop' identified 459 documented violations of law. and led to hundreds of published media reports by the British press and independent American news outlets including WorldTribune.com.
In his lawsuit filed in Los Angeles, Hunter Biden accuses Ziegler and his company — Marco Polo USA — and 10 unidentified associates of spreading "tens of thousands of emails, thousands of photos, and dozens of videos and recordings" from the laptop that were considered "pornographic."
Ziegler's legal team alleges that Biden's lawsuit is "aimed at chilling the valid exercise of the constitutional rights of freedom of speech" and investigative research once known as "newsgathering."
Marco Polo's posts sharing the contents of the laptop "constitutes protected activity because it involves a public figure and is a matter of public importance," Ziegler's lawyers said.
In the 14-page civil complaint, Biden’s attorneys allege that Ziegler is a "zealot" who has unleashed a "sustained, unhinged and obsessed campaign" against the entire Biden family for over two years and "spent countless hours accessing, tampering with, manipulating, altering, copying and damaging computer data" with his associates.
"While Defendant Ziegler is entitled to his extremist and counterfactual opinions, he has no right to engage in illegal activities to advance his right-wing agenda," attorneys Abbe Lowell, Bryan Sullivan, Zachary Hansen and Paul Salvaty previously wrote.
In his reply, Ziegler stated that the lawsuit is a "quintessential SLAPP action." According to Wikipedia, SLAPP actions or "strategic litigation against public participation, are lawsuits intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition.
The reply continued:
Plaintiff brought this lawsuit in retaliation against Defendants for publishing incriminating evidence regarding Plaintiff and his father. Plaintiff claims Defendants’ collection of data is not protected activity (Opp’n at 24), but Defendants’ compilation of information involving a sitting president and his son constitutes newsgathering, which is protected activity. See Lieberman v. KCOP Television, Inc., 110 Cal. App. 4th 156, 166 (2003). Plaintiff’s lawsuit is subject to dismissal under Rule 12(b)(6) and California Code of Civil Procedure § 425.16 because Defendants’ investigatory reporting was in furtherance of matters of significant public interest.
Ziegler has also called for the recusal of Judge Hernan Vera.Smooth brain SCOTUS "reporter" @joshgerstein clearly cannot read, or he's being purposely dishonest.
It's more likely the latter. This is the nuanced argument we make: https://t.co/xWNLa8Oa6A pic.twitter.com/wVChW1dELa — Marco Polo (@MarcoPolo501c3) March 8, 2024
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