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Hunter Biden asked the State Department for help with a project involving Ukrainian energy company Burisma while his father President Joe Biden was vice president, according to newly-released records.
Documents and records obtained by The New York Times show that, in 2016, the president’s son sent at least one letter to the US ambassador to Italy on behalf of the Burisma, the gas company that he sat on the board of at the time.
Burisma was having trouble gaining regulatory approval for a geothermal project in Tuscany when Hunter waded in by writing a letter to John Phillips, the US ambassador in Rome in 2016, according to The Times.
Officials in Italy were said to be “uneasy” with Biden’s letter and an official based in the US embassy in Rome responded: “I want to be careful about promising too much.
“This is a Ukrainian company and, purely to protect ourselves [the United States Government] should not be actively advocating with the government of Italy without the company going through the [Department of Commerce] Advocacy Center.”
The project never got off the ground.
Hunter’s lawyer Abbe Lowell told The Independent in a statement that the president’s son made “a simple introduction” to Phillips “and others” which was “normal and proper practice.”
He said: “No meeting occurred, no project materialized, no request for anything in the US was ever sought, and only an introduction in Italy was requested.
“The letter, as well as those written by others at Burisma, sought nothing more than an introduction, as hundreds of businesses do every year to ambassadors and embassies.”
The Independent has contacted the State Department and the White House for comment.
A White House spokesperson told The Times the president was not aware his son was reaching out to embassy officials in Italy on behalf of Burisma when he was vice president.
The newspaper reports it had been seeking documents from the State Department since 2021 via a Freedom of Information request and was forced to sue in order to obtain them.
According to The Times, it only received the records after the president announced he would not be running for re-election in November.
Hunter was on the board of Burisma – an oil and gas company and one of the largest natural gas operators in Ukraine – for five years and was paid around $11m between 2013 and 2018 for legal work.
The company has been at the center of many political storms involving the Biden family, as Republicans have attempted to tie the president to his son’s business dealings abroad.
Republicans previously accused the president, without any evidence, of improperly withholding a loan guarantee and taking a bribe to pressure Ukraine into firing prosecutor general Viktor Shokin to prevent a corruption investigation of Burisma.
The accusation was later proven to be false and Donald Trump was impeached in 2019 for allegedly attempting to coerce Ukraine and other countries to investigate and provide damaging narratives about his political rival.
In February this year, former FBI informant Alexander Smirnov was arrested on charges accusing him of falsely telling his FBI handler that executives from Burisma had paid the president and his son $5m each around 2015. Smirnov is currently awaiting trial and has pleaded not guilty.
Hunter’s letter to US embassy officials in Italy is the latest in a long line of scandals and legal cases surrounding the president’s son.
In June, he was convicted of three federal firearms-related felonies. He is yet to be sentenced and is appealing that verdict.
He is also awaiting trial over a separate tax case.
He faces three felony tax charges and additional misdemeanors for allegedly failing to pay $1.4m in income taxes between 2016 to 2020 while maintaining “an extravagant lifestyle” spending on “drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing.”
Biden has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges against him. He is due to go on trial in California from September 5 and, if convicted, faces a maximum of 17 years in prison.
In a Los Angeles federal court filing from special counsel David Weiss’s office last week, prosecutors alleged Hunter had accepted payments from a Romanian oligarch in the hope that he might be able to “influence US government agencies” on his client’s behalf during his father’s presidency.
“The government will introduce the evidence... that [Hunter Biden] and Business Associate 1 received compensation from a foreign principal who was attempting to influence US policy and public opinion and cause the United States to investigate the Romanian investigation of [Popoviciu] in Romania,” prosecutors wrote in their latest submission.
