LOS ANGELES - Illinois native Garrett Ziegler, of the Marco Polo website, filed a declaration against Hunter Biden’s computer abuse suit stating, “We are not hackers. We are simply publishers.”
Excerpts from Ziegler's declaration, which he signed under penalty of perjury on Dec. 21, are listed below:
- "From February 2019 through January 2021, I worked in the White House. First, I worked as a policy analyst and later as an associate director in the office of trade and manufacturing policy…"
- "Marco Polo is a research group whose mission is to expose corruption and blackmail. Specifically, Marco Polo identifies, researches, analyzes and reports on corruption in both the public and private sectors…"
- "Marco Polo does not charge users nor has it ever received for profit sales. It relies solely on donations from individuals…"
- "I received a copy of the hard drive of the abandoned Biden laptop in 2021 from an associate of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. I accessed the information from the copy of the hard drive in Virginia. I have never seen or accessed Hunter Biden’s original laptop…"
- "On Oct. 19, 2022, Marco Polo published a 644 page report entitled 'Report on the Biden Laptop.' The report is a comprehensive dossier detailing 459 verifiable violations of state and federal laws and regulations identified from information on the Biden laptop. The report contains 2,020 footnotes…"
- "Marco Polo also created and published an online searchable database of 128,000 emails found on the Biden laptop…"
- "We had no need to access additional information and would not do so even if we were able to do so, as the contents of the duplicated files were voluminous enough…"
- "I worked on the report primarily in my home town in Illinois, which is where the evidence is located. All decision making regarding what to post on the website occurred in Illinois, the nerve center of operations…"
- "The metadata concerning the duplicated iPhone backup file on our external hard drive indicates that the last backup made of the iPhone file to the plaintiff’s laptop which he left at the repair shop of John Paul Mac Isaac on April 12, 2019, occurred on Feb. 6, 2019, while still in the plaintiff’s possession based upon all of the facts known to me to be provably true beyond dispute."
- "Based on our analysis, we concluded the same as digital forensic investigators at Maryman and Associates and digital forensic expert Gus Dimitrelos: The duplicate of the plaintiff’s laptop is authentic, the files have not been altered in any way, and the copied laptop files contain information which are matters of public interest worthy of our efforts to accurately report…"
- "Plaintiff is attempting to chill our First Amendment rights and harass us through a frivolous and vexatious lawsuit."