The guy who gave Hunter Biden’s laptop to Rudy Giuliani owes Twitter money thanks to a failed lawsuit.
John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of the Delaware repair store where Biden allegedly left a MacBook Pro, attempted to sue Twitter for defamation in federal court. The judge tossed out the case with prejudice, meaning Mac Isaac can’t sue again, and ordered Mac Isaac to pay Twitter’s attorney’s fees.
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According to copies of the lawsuit obtained by Law & Crime, Mac Isaac claimed Twitter defamed him when it locked The New York Post’s account following its publication of a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. The reason Twitter gave for locking the account was that The New York Post had acquired the material published in the story via hacking. According to Mac Isaac, calling The New York Post a hacker implied that he was also a hacker. The New York Post never mentioned Mac Isaac’s name in its initial story.
“Defendant Twitter’s actions and statements had the specific intent to communicate to its users….that Plaintiff is a hacker and/ or hacked the published materials,” the lawsuit said. “According to Merriam-Webster, a ‘hacker’ is a ‘person who illegally gains access to and sometimes tampers with information in a computer system.’ The term ‘hacker’ is not only widely disparaging, particularly when said about someone who owns a computer repair business but is also a criminal act. Plaintiff is not a hacker.”
The court said Mac Isaac’s theory was “flawed for several reasons.”
The biggest was that Mac Isaac’s lawsuit conceded that The New York Post never identified him or his store by name and that this information came to light only after journalists at other outlets had figured it out. According to the lawsuit, it doesn’t matter that Twitter and The New York Post didn’t identify him directly because other people eventually figured it out.
“Thus, because [Mac Isaac] has asserted a claim for defamation per se, looking outside the four corners of the explanations to show that ‘the person defamed is plaintiff’ would run afoul the very nature of a per se action,” the court said. Basically, Mac Isaac doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on and admitted it in his own court filings.
This is Mac Isaac’s second unsuccessful attempt to sue Twitter. In December around the time Mac Isaac released a bizarre YouTube video, a Florida judge dismissed his previous attempt saying he didn’t have the jurisdiction to hear the case. At the time, Mac Isaac lived in Delaware and Twitter was incorporated in Delaware.
