The group that published Hunter Biden’s laptop contents demanded on Friday nearly $93,000 in legal fees after a federal lawsuit filed by the former president’s son was dismissed earlier this month.
Marco Polo, a nonprofit organization run by former Trump White House aide Garrett Ziegler, filed a motion for attorneys fees this week to the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, calling Biden’s now-dropped lawsuit “ridiculous” in a post on X.
“Good morning,” Marco Polo posted to X following the motion. “We just filed our motion for attorneys fees in response to the ridiculous federal lawsuit brought against us by [Hunter Biden].”
The suit was dismissed with prejudice in March after Hunter Biden said he could no longer afford the litigation. In a separate California court filing on March 6, the younger Biden disclosed he had fallen millions of dollars into debt, citing a collapse in artwork sales and low royalties from his memoir Beautiful Things.
“It was clear that Mr. Biden had not reasonably investigated the basic claims prior to filing this action as he had not even consulted an expert witness on a highly technical case,” the Marco Polo group said in its 27-page motion. The lawsuit had alleged that Ziegler and Marco Polo gained access to Hunter Biden’s digital files through “illegal hacking,” despite the well-known origins of the material stemming from a laptop he allegedly abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop.
Marco Polo’s filing also accused Hunter Biden’s legal team of misconduct. It noted reports that Hunter Biden traveled to South Africa during a week he was supposed to appear for a deposition and before the court ruled on a key motion. “Mr. Biden’s counsel audaciously described Defendants’ counsel as ‘despicable’” for raising the issue, the motion stated.
In a follow-up post, Marco Polo’s account posted, “Maybe [Hunter’s lawyer] Eric Early can donate $100k to [Marco Polo] for the harm his firm has wrought.”
The Washington Examiner contacted a lawyer for the former first son.
The Hunter Biden laptop story first emerged in October 2020, just weeks before the presidential election, when the New York Post published emails and files allegedly retrieved from a laptop Hunter Biden left at a Delaware repair shop.
Despite containing material later verified by multiple news outlets, the story was swiftly censored on major platforms. Twitter and Facebook restricted the sharing of the article, while dozens of former intelligence officials signed a letter claiming the release of the laptop data had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
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Legacy media outlets largely echoed those concerns, casting doubt on the story’s legitimacy. However, in the years since, the laptop and its contents have been authenticated by forensic analysts, the FBI, and independent journalists, with no evidence emerging that it was part of a foreign disinformation campaign.
The initial suppression of the story has since become a flashpoint in debates over censorship, media bias, and election interference.