The scorched-earth activist trying to take down Hunter Biden
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
When Lunden Roberts needed an expert to help prove that Hunter Biden had the money to keep making substantial child support payments for their 4-year-old daughter, her legal team turned to Garrett Ziegler.
Ziegler doesn’t have a degree in personal finance. He doesn’t personally know the president’s son. But Ziegler, whose first job out of college was working as a low-level aide in the Trump White House, has fashioned himself into a Hunter Biden specialist, compiling personal and financial records from anywhere he can get them. Then, his nonprofit posts them online.
Ziegler, 27, enjoys a following of tens of thousands on social media and the attention of conservative media. He has made himself a chief antagonist of the younger Biden, prompting lawsuits, an Internal Revenue Service complaint and other legal pushback from Hunter Biden’s circle.
Ziegler is at the vanguard of a sprawling network of Biden antagonists, from right-wing media organizations to congressional leaders to MAGA activists, that is focused intensely on the president’s son. They see Hunter Biden’s activities as his father’s biggest political vulnerability, a conclusion reflected in the House GOP’s recent decision to launch an impeachment inquiry .
On Wednesday, Hunter Biden sued Ziegler in federal court in California, alleging that the activist had violated privacy laws and calling him “a zealot who has waged a sustained, unhinged and obsessed campaign against [Hunter Biden] and the entire Biden family for more than two years.”
After Ziegler, who served as a staffer for Trump aide Peter Navarro, a MAGA hard-liner and election denier, left the White House in early 2021, he began focusing his attention on President Biden ’s son, turning his formidable energy to unearthing every detail he could. Ziegler received some of Hunter Biden’s financial records, saying he got them from someone who worked at Biden’s bank. He has delved into Hunter Biden’s business dealings. He even acquired a copy of the diary of Ashley Biden, Hunter’s sister.
But his biggest project has been mining embarrassing information, including nude photos and videos, from what appears to be a personal laptop that Hunter Biden left at a repair shop in April 2019. Ziegler said in an interview that he got a hard drive with the purported contents of the laptop from Rudy Giuliani before the Jan. 6 , 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
In October 2022, Ziegler announced that the nonprofit he founded, Marco Polo, had published a voluminous report on the laptop, claiming to have unearthed at least 459 criminal or regulatory violations. This claim has not been verified, and Hunter Biden’s team dismisses it as absurd. (The Washington Post has also obtained a hard drive purportedly from the laptop and authenticated some of its contents.)
“We want (our report) to be on coffee tables and bookshelves and be brought out whenever you hear something in the news,” Ziegler said in the interview. On his Telegram page, where he has a following of about 100,000, he added, “We believe that it is the deepest digital colonoscopy ever performed on a sitting U.S. first family.”
Ziegler has a smaller following than some better-known conservative firebrands. But that relatively low profile allows him to unleash inflammatory attacks with less scrutiny, said Jared Holt, who researches extremists for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue think tank.
“There’s an incentive for him to take the extra step and to be just a little more outrageous, because it’s the sort of audience he’s cultivated and the part of the ecosystem he fits into,” Holt said.
Some of Hunter Biden’s associates worry that Ziegler, with his sometimes-wild theorizing combined with an encyclopedic knowledge of Hunter Biden’s history, will influence the public discussion as well as the House probes of the president’s son.
Ziegler argues that he is filling a vital role by scrutinizing the Bidens, particularly because in his view Republicans are not going after Hunter Biden hard enough. “The right wing has totally f---ed up this response,” he said. “It’s been frustrating at the pace. Now we’re seven months in, and I don’t think they’ve subpoenaed Hunter.”
To Democrats, Ziegler and his efforts embody all that is wrong with an era when a single individual can use the internet to humiliate and smear his chosen target. Hunter Biden is a recovering drug addict who has experienced tragedy in his life, they say, and whatever his flaws, they have no bearing on the president’s performance.
Ziegler has “shown himself as a reckless, irresponsible chaos agent,” said Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), a House Judiciary Committee member. At a hearing in July, Swalwell raised concerns about Ziegler’s postings attacking federal law enforcement agents.
Ziegler contends that his aggressive actions are justified because his ultimate target is not Hunter Biden, but the president. He asserts that Hunter Biden has been involved for decades in shady business deals with China-based firms and the president has known about it, making the senior Biden beholden to China.
“My focus is never on Hunter Biden — it’s only Hunter’s relationship to Joe,” Ziegler said. “My whole obsession with the Bidens starts and ends with Joe. It doesn’t start and end with Hunter.”
Hunter Biden’s legal team has not taken kindly to Ziegler’s efforts. In his recent lawsuit, Hunter alleges that Ziegler and the other members of his nonprofit illegally hacked into portions of Biden’s laptop that were encrypted, saying they ignored demands to cease and desist, an allegation Ziegler disputes. Ziegler says he would not “honor” cease-and-desist requests in this matter because he believes his actions have been lawful.
Last February, Hunter Biden’s attorney Abbe Lowell challenged the tax-exempt status of Marco Polo’s parent company, ICU, writing to the IRS that it “has operated as little more than a thinly disguised political operation to attack the Biden administration and the Biden family.” Ziegler said that his personal criticism of the Bidens does not reflect the official views of his nonprofit.
Hunter Biden’s friend and benefactor Kevin Morris has also sued Ziegler, accusing him of harassment and doxing. After the child support settlement, for example, Ziegler posted the coordinates of Morris’s plane on his public Telegram page and speculated about Morris’s potential travels. Ziegler’s attorneys have argued in court filings that he was exercising his free-speech rights.
In one of his most notable moves, Ziegler joined the contentious child support case between Roberts, an Arkansas resident, and Hunter Biden over their 4-year-old daughter, Navy. Hunter Biden initially contested his paternity of the girl until a DNA test proved the relationship, and he has said he remembers little of his relationship with Roberts because it occurred when he was in a spiral of drug addiction.
Everyone's arse is up for grabs, so have at it.
Tags
Who is online
49 visitors
‘Connect the dots’ is a popular admonition for certain members on NT, however, I would add one more … who drew the dots?
The WH & DOJ who have fought tooth & nail against turning over subpoenaed documents.
A rare appearance by you on one of my seeds, are you here to take credit for the games played by the "are we there yet" backseaters?
but that was perfectly acceptable from 2017 to 2021, wasn't it?
it's either double standards or no standards with some
Your career as a seeder is in its infancy. I tend to focus on news stories.
That's controvertible.
That is impressive, but the question people ask is what is it for?
It reminds me of another not so famous Samuel Johnson quote:
“Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”
And the hypocrisy continues unabated, the same group who cheered the Lincoln project whining like little bitches over Marco Polo. Sucks when your own actions are turned on you.
As with Tucker Carlson, pickles should enter via the mouth and not the butt.
who? isn't that putin's pool boy?
Viktor Orbán subbed him out.
It’s better to be his pool boy than his cock holster like Biden and company.
funny, I published 2 maga cock holster stories over the weekend.
boobs was on an apology tour justifying her skank ho behavior
I saw one interview she had, telling the host that she was eccentric, which I thought was a funny word for mutual public groping...
2 Biden articles? I must’ve missed them.
Is that what they're calling it these days?
Did you see Trae Crowder's take on Boobs Boebert? One of his best.
Is PD&D all you have?
This guy sounds like a real loser. Typical Trump acolyte.
Is this what you meant in your Red Box Rules?
Fecal focus!
I do appreciate scatological humor
Reminds me of something I saw on Law and Order SVU where one of those scummy talking heads was on trial for inciting people (think Faux 'news') - and the talking head said something along the lines of 'taking the temperature of the (think MAGAts and supporters/enablers of the former 'president') people' and Alexandra Cabot said 'Rectally'?
LOL!
I liked when Fred Thompson was the, DA? Attorney General?, on L&OSVU, I liked him as an actor, not so much as a presidential candidate.
He was the District Attorney for Manhattan. He was all right, but my favorite will always be Adam Schmidt (Steven Hill was the actor who played him)
Yeah, I think he was my favorite also.
I just meant to say that I thought he was a good actor but he should have stayed out of politics, IMHO.
Someone doing to Brandon's family what so damn many have done to any and all conservatives?
Sucks to be on the receiving end doesn't it?
After the last 7 years and counting of Democrat bullshit; Hunter and his lawyers can find their third point of contacts and never come out again.
“Sucks to be on the receiving end…”
Do tell.
He just did!