Hunter Biden asked a federal judge on Wednesday to drop his lawsuit against a former Trump aide that is related to the release of information from a laptop thought to belong to the son of former President Joe Biden. Hunter Biden said that his limited funds make it difficult to continue with the case.
In papers sent to a federal court in California, Biden’s lawyers asked U.S. District Judge Hernan D. Vera to throw out the 2023 lawsuit against Garrett Ziegler. They said that Biden’s income “has dropped significantly” and that he owed a lot of money (millions of dollars).
Biden’s lawyers said that the wildfires in the Pacific Palisades made his money problems even worse because they made his rental home “unlivable for an extended period of time.”
They wrote that Biden “has had difficulty in finding a new permanent place to live as well as finding it difficult to earn a living.” They also said that Biden should use his time and resources to deal with his move, the damage to his rental house, and his family’s living costs, “rather than this litigation.”
Ziegler and the company he started, Marco Polo, were sued by Biden in September 2023. Biden said they broke state and federal laws by trying to make a searchable online database with 128,000 emails that were thought to be from Biden.
Ziegler, who worked as an assistant to Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro from February 2019 to January 2021, had asked the judge in charge of the case to throw out the case, but the judge had already turned it down.
Biden said in a related court document that he owes a lot of money and is “not in a position where I can borrow money.”
He said that he was looking forward to paid speaking engagements and appearances after getting feedback on his art and memoir, which his lawyers said had been his main source of income in the past, “but that has not happened.”
Biden talked about his falling profits from selling art. He said that in the two or three years before the lawsuit, he had sold 27 pieces of art for an average of $54,500 each. But since then, he had only sold one piece of art for $36,000.
It was found that Biden was guilty of federal gun charges and a federal tax case. He was set to be sentenced in December for the gun case, but President Joe Biden released him early.
Following his unconditional pardon from President Biden, Hunter Biden is also facing allegations of owing over $300,000 in unpaid rent to former landlords.
Earlier this week, Hunter Biden abandoned his case against two Internal Revenue Service whistleblowers, which he brought in September 2023.
Biden’s counsel filed a motion in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia to dismiss the complaint with prejudice, which means it cannot be re-filed in any court.
The complaint, first filed by the former first son two years ago, stated that IRS Special Agent Gary Shapley and IRS Criminal Investigator Joseph Ziegler had “targeted and sought to embarrass” Biden via media remarks divulging the specifics of a “private citizen’s” tax affairs.
Shapley and Zielger testified before the House Oversight Committee earlier that year, claiming they encountered several constraints while investigating former President Biden’s son.
“It’s always been clear that the lawsuit was an attempt to intimidate us,” Shapley and Zielger said in a statement after Hunter Biden dropped the case, according to the New York Post. “Intimidation and retaliation were never going to work. We truly wanted our day in court to provide the complete story, but it appears Mr. Biden was afraid to actually fight this case in a court of law after all.”
“His voluntary dismissal of the case tells you everything you need to know about who was right and who was wrong,” they added.
Lawyers for the two whistleblowers first emphasized how Hunter Biden “dismissed his case with prejudice – meaning he can never bring it again.”
