An ex-attorney for former President Joe Biden’s (D) son, Hunter Biden, must pay $50,000 to a former Trump aide in closing out a legal dispute linked to the “Laptop from Hell.”
The Superior Court of California ordered Kevin Morris to shell out the money to conservative nonprofit research group Marco Polo’s founder Garrett Ziegler, Fox News reported Thursday.
“The ruling ends a protracted dispute over whether Ziegler impersonated a Democratic strategist to pry sensitive information out of Morris about the Hunter Biden laptop during a conversation over the phone in 2022” when Morris spoke with someone whom he reportedly thought was a Democratic operative about the laptop.
“But when, after the call, he received an image depicting a squid, the phrase ‘NOTHING IS BEYOND OUR REACH,’ and the words ‘Marco Polo,’ Morris realized his mistake,” the Fox article said, noting Morris concluded it must have been Ziegler, who looked through the laptop’s contents and later founded Marco Polo.
Ziegler is a Republican strategist who previously worked in the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy.
Hunter Biden filed a civil lawsuit in 2023 against Ziegler for publishing 128,000 indexed emails from his “Laptop from Hell,” Breitbart News reported at the time:
Marco Polo issued a digital indexed dossier in October entitled, “Report on the Biden Laptop,” complete with cited timelines, entities, transactions, emails, videos, texts, and photos of the Biden family. The dossier boasts 128,000 emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop, which was abandoned in a Delaware computer repair store.
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Hunter Biden’s lawyers allege that Garrett Ziegler, Marco Polo, and ten unidentified people waged a “sustained, unhinged and obsessed campaign against” the president’s son by accessing “tens of thousands of emails, thousands of photos, and dozens of videos and recordings” from the abandoned laptop.
In May of 2024, the outlet reported Morris, who has been called Biden’s “sugar brother,” was allegedly going to stop paying for Hunter’s legal defense, and described Morris as a “key individual in the Biden family orbit” who donated to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign and “helped Hunter enter the art business, a market known for corruption.”
Days after that report was published, the outlet said IRS whistleblower emails showed the CIA prevented the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) from questioning Morris as a witness in its probe of the younger Biden.
Morris lent Hunter $2 million to satisfy IRS debt and was “apparently involved with the CIA in August 2021,” the article read, adding, “The DOJ could not speak with Morris ‘as a witness’ in its probe of Hunter based on CIA direction, according to previously unreleased, sensitive information gathered by IRS special agent and current whistleblower Gary Shapley.”