Supreme Court slams door on ex-Trump aide behind 2020 voting machine plot

A former Trump White House aide who once brokered a plot to seize voting machines, went on a racist Telegram rant, and built a nonprofit around publishing Biden family dirt just struck out at the Supreme Court. On Monday, the justices declined without dissent to hear a petition from Garrett Ziegler — ending his bid to squeeze more protection out of California's anti-SLAPP statute.

The case traces back to a 2023 lawsuit alleging Ziegler had impersonated a Democratic fundraiser to extract information about Hunter Biden's laptop, then published his target's personal contact details — triggering a torrent of harassment. Ziegler responded with an anti-SLAPP motion — a legal tool designed to protect defendants from suits that target free speech activity. He lost most of it.

The dispute began with a 2022 phone call. The plaintiff picked up believing he was speaking with a Democratic operative. After the call, he received an image of a squid, the phrase "NOTHING IS BEYOND OUR REACH," and the words "Marco Polo."

The man on the other end of that call was Kevin Morris — the entertainment lawyer once dubbed Hunter Biden's "sugar brother." A California court ultimately ordered Morris to pay Ziegler $50,000, but Ziegler's attorney argued the anti-SLAPP statute hadn't gone nearly far enough.

"It's not really how I envisioned it would play out — which is why we filed a petition with the Supreme Court," attorney Jennifer Holliday told Fox News Digital. The justices were unmoved.

Ziegler brokered the now-infamous Dec. 18, 2020, Oval Office meeting between Trump and figures including Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell, designed to convince the president to seize voting machines and overturn the election. After testifying before the January 6 committee in 2022, he erupted in a nearly 30-minute Telegram rant, calling the panel "a Bolshevistic, anti-white campaign" and attacking former colleagues Cassidy Hutchinson and Alyssa Farah Griffin. Raw Story noted he also reshares content from white nationalist Nicholas Fuentes.

At Hunter Biden's 2024 gun trial, his wife, Melissa Cohen-Biden, confronted Ziegler in a courthouse hallway, calling him a "Nazi piece of s---." Ziegler denied the accusation.

Not a single justice thought the case was worth their time.