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Hunter Biden (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite), Garrett Ziegler talks Hunter Biden on YouTube (YouTube/Reporter.London screengrab)
A federal judge on Friday declined to force the recusal of a fellow Joe Biden-appointed colleague in Hunter Biden’s “hacking” lawsuit against a former policy analyst in the Trump White House, writing that the effort failed just like the former president failed to remove a Clinton appointee from the never successful Trump v. Clinton RICO case.
U.S. District Judge Hernan Vera was the target of Garrett Ziegler’s recusal motion, which reasoned that Vera’s status as a 2023 appointee of President Joe Biden appointee, coupled with a donation to the president’s 2020 election campaign and the political “subject matter of the litigation,” raised reasonable questions about whether he could be impartial. But Vera was not the one who rendered a decision on recusal. The motion was referred to U.S. District Judge Monica Ramirez Almadani for a ruling, and she agreed with Hunter Biden’s lawyers that former President Donald Trump’s unsuccessful Trump v. Clinton RICO suit recusal bids were “instructive.”
Almadani, also a 2023 Biden appointee, wrote that Ziegler did not “point to any evidence” that Vera had “any connection to any litigant in this case” beyond the fact that he was appointed by President Biden and donated to the Biden campaign in 2020, three years before he was nominated as a federal judge.
Ziegler, failing to show “any evidence of bias stemming from extrajudicial factors,” himself confirmed that Vera’s “appointment and past campaign contributions alone and together do not warrant disqualification,” the judge said. Nor did Ziegler succeed in arguing that the politically charged nature of the case necessarily meant Vera had to step aside.
That’s when Trump v. Clinton came up again.
“Finally, without explanation or legal support, Defendants claim that ‘in light of the politically charged rematch between President Biden and President Trump, another consideration is that Defendant Ziegler previously worked for President Trump, Biden’s two-time political opponent, and the Complaint contains allegations that Defendants only rendered the Biden Laptop to advance a right-wing agenda.’ That a case may be ‘politically charged’ or sensitive and, for the sake of analysis, arguably involve the President who appointed the presiding judge, is insufficient to mandate recusal,” Almadani wrote. “The Court agrees with Plaintiff that Trump v. Clinton, 599 F. Supp. 3d 1247 (S.D. Fla. 2022), is instructive here.”
In April, Hunter Biden’s lawyers asserted that Ziegler’s recusal campaign against Vera was not unlike Trump’s campaign against Bill Clinton-appointed U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks in the Trump v. Hillary Clinton RICO lawsuit. The plaintiff called the case “instructive,” as Almadani did in her ruling.
In the Trump v. Clinton case, Middlebrooks refused to recuse himself, writing that he had “never met or spoken with” the Clintons. Thereafter, Trump attorneys sought the judge’s disqualification a second time, this time claiming “politically charged language in the Court’s recent opinions and the extrajudicial factual research performed by the Court” created the “appearance of bias.” That second recusal attempt also failed.
When Ziegler moved for Vera’s recusal in early March, he maintained that Vera’s appointment by Hunter Biden’s father, the past campaign donation, and the political “subject matter of the case” together raised reasonable questions about whether the judge could impartially preside over a lawsuit with potential to block “investigative reporting and contents on the Biden Laptop, possibly impacting” House Republicans’ frustrated impeachment probe of the president.
The defendant, who previously worked for former Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro as associate director in the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, was sued by Hunter Biden last September for allegedly “hacking into” an “encrypted iPhone backup.”
Hunter Biden alleged that Ziegler, whom he called a “zealot,” and his group ICU LLC engaged in “illegal activities to advance his right-wing agenda” and “waged a sustained, unhinged and obsessed campaign against Plaintiff and the entire Biden family for more than two years,” culminating in the “accessing, tampering with, manipulating, altering, copying and damaging computer data that they do not own and that they claim to have obtained from hacking into Plaintiff’s iPhone data and from scouring a copy of the hard drive of what they claim to be Plaintiff’s ‘laptop’ computer.”
Ziegler responded that Biden filed the lawsuit to chill free speech in “retaliation” over the defendant’s publication of “information, media, and emails originating from the files of the infamous ‘Biden Laptop.’”
For Almadani, there was no persuasive reason to order up Vera’s recusal, so she denied the motion.
“To rule in favor of recusal here would require that any federal judge appointed by President Biden who made political contributions to his presidential campaign in the past would need to recuse themselves from this case despite random assignment. That is, under Defendants’ reasoning, no judge under these circumstances could be reasonably perceived as impartial given the nature of the litigation,” she said. “As already explained, and Defendants accept, ‘[t]here is no support whatsoever for the contention that a judge can be disqualified simply on the identity of the President who appointed [them].’”
Read the order here.
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