- John Paul Mac Isaac, the repairman of the laptop behind the New York Post’s dubious statement about Hunter Biden, sued Twitter on Monday for libel.
- Isaac claims that Twitter falsely portrayed him as a hooker by banning the Post’s tweets about his story, based on a Twitter policy against sharing hacked material.
- Isaac said the scandal led to him closing his business, and he is asking the court to award him $ 500 million in damages.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
The laptop in the midst of the controversial exposure of the Hunter Biden in the New York Post is suing Twitter for libel, saying the social media giant insinuated that he was a hacker and that he had lost his business.
The front page of the New York Post the day after Twitter censored the newspaper’s tweets about the dubious Hunter Biden exposure.
The New York Post
John Paul Mac Isaac explained in his lawsuit, filed Monday in the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Florida and considered by Business Insider, that he was hired in April 2019 to repair Biden’s laptop, but Biden got the device never came to fetch, despite Isaac reaching out to him at least twice.
Isaac then handed over the device to the FBI and shared a hard drive copy with Robert Costello, a personal lawyer of Rudy Giuliani – the personal lawyer of President Donald Trump, the Post reported in their statement. It was Giuliani who provided the information on the laptop to the Post for their story about Biden and his business dealings with Ukraine.
Shortly after the report published their story, Twitter suspended the newspaper’s Twitter account and prevented people from tweeting about the story, citing a policy against ‘distribution of 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 left to him.
“Plaintiff, as a direct result of the Defendant’s actions and statements, is now widely regarded as a hacker and on the same day that Defendant classified Plaintiff as a hacker, Plaintiff began to receive negative reviews of his receiving business, as well as threats to his person and property, ”reads the lawsuit.
Twitter later withheld the elimination of the Post’s Twitter account and allowed for discussion of the story – albeit adding contextual labels.
But Isaac said the damage was done. He said he had to close his business “as a direct result” of Twitter’s “false statements.”
Isaac is asking the court to award him $ 500 million in criminal damages, and to force Twitter to retract a “false statement in public.”
The report in the Post claims that Hunter Biden used his influential father to forge business ties in Ukraine, but the story had several holes in it and many questions were raised about the origin of the laptop, as well as the timing of the exposure just before the 2020 election.
More than 50 former intelligence officials signed a letter in October saying the Post’s story had ‘all the classic features of a Russian intelligence operation’, but Trump’s spy chief said there was no evidence the laptop was part of. A Russian disinformation campaign. “