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Over the past few years, President Joe Biden’s administration and its most ardent supporters have consistently denied the growing accusations that his son, Hunter Biden, leveraged his father’s political clout as a former senator and vice president to benefit foreign business partners and companies.
However, in a suspiciously timed development, the Biden-Harris administration has seemingly acknowledged that Hunter did seek favorable treatment from the U.S. government on behalf of Ukrainian energy company Burisma, where he controversially held a board position while his father was vice president.
This revelation reportedly stems from a series of heavily redacted emails released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed several years ago, conveniently surfacing just days after President Biden concluded his challenging re-election campaign.
In 2021, The New York Times reported that it had submitted a FOIA request to the State Department regarding any documents related to Hunter Biden’s alleged requests for U.S. government assistance on behalf of his foreign business partners.
Initially, the request was denied, but a lawsuit ultimately compelled the gradual release of thousands of documents over several months. However, most of these documents were heavily redacted and unreadable.
Among the released documents was a series of emails from July 2016, which disclosed that Hunter had contacted then-U.S. Ambassador to Italy John Phillips in a letter seeking assistance in arranging a meeting between the president of Tuscany at the time, Enrico Rossi, and Burisma officials. This meeting was intended to discuss a proposed geothermal energy production project.
A Commerce Department official at the U.S. Embassy in Rome was assigned to respond to Hunter’s request, but wrote to another unidentified U.S. official, “I want to be careful about promising too much. This is a Ukrainian company and, purely to protect ourselves, U.S.G. should not be actively advocating with the government of Italy without the company going through the [Department of Commerce] Advocacy Center.”
The Times noted that the released emails coincide with other emails at the time that were found on Hunter’s abandoned laptop, including one from former business partner Eric Schwerin to an Italian business associate that explained, “Burisma is hoping that some of its executives can get a meeting with the president to discuss their geothermal business in Tuscany.”
The outlet also referenced a separate email from the Commerce Department official who wrote to other U.S. officials of the request for help and said, “The Ambassador already replied to one letter from Mr. Biden,” and added, “He may be shopping for more support than he got here.”
The Times further reported that Hunter Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, confirmed that his client had “asked various people” in the U.S. government for help and made a “proper request” for action, but noted that “No meeting occurred, no project materialized, no request for anything in the U.S. was ever sought, and only an introduction in Italy was requested.”
Meanwhile, the White House insisted that President Biden was completely unaware of his son’s outreach to the ambassador, and the elderly ambassador himself told the outlet that while he had no recollection of the request from Hunter, he likely would have authorized a response but “wouldn’t get us involved in something like that” because he always tried to avoid creating the perception that connected individuals, like the then-VP’s son, received special treatment.
The State Department maintained that the timing of the released emails after the president’s re-election bid ended was entirely coincidental. They stated that the release had been authorized prior to Biden publicly announcing his withdrawal from the race.
Interestingly enough, the released emails emerged just days after Special Counsel David Weiss submitted a filing in Hunter Biden’s tax evasion case that outlined evidence prosecutors would introduce of Hunter’s “lobbying and consulting business” with a Romanian business partner that involved asking the U.S. government to intervene in favor of another Romanian business partner under investigation for bribery — an act for which Hunter appeared to be paid around $1 million.
“The government does not intend to reference allegations that the defendant violated [the Foreign Agents Registration Act] or improperly coordinated with the Obama Administration,” the filing stated, but rather would prove that Hunter’s associate “structured a business relationship in an effort to avoid having to register as a foreign agent, and that the defendant and his business partners did reach out to government officials, specifically the United States Department of State.”
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY), who has led a years-long probe of alleged Biden family corruption, told Newsmax of the filing, “This was a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act because Hunter Biden was getting paid by these foreign nationals in Romania to influence the Obama-Biden administration,” and added, “This is, I think, the biggest political corruption scandal in our history’s lifetime.”
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