Hunter Biden sought assistance from the United States government in 2016 to help Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company where he served on the board, expand its business into Italy while his father served as vice president in the Obama administration.
Accusations that Hunter Biden, now a convicted felon, leveraged his father’s position in the White House to help him secure lucrative business deals overseas have followed the cocaine addict for many years.
The New York Times reported on Tuesday that the Biden-Harris State Department released records to the newspaper late last month about Hunter Biden’s request after hiding the information from the public for years. The State Department refused to release the actual text of the letter.
The Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, was filed by the newspaper in June 2021. The newspaper filed a lawsuit eight months later after the State Department refused to release records. After another year and a half, the department tried to close the case by releasing a large trove of documents — though none that had anything to do with Hunter Biden’s contacts with the U.S. government.
The Times questioned the legitimacy of the department’s search given that it had failed to produce records that were discovered on Hunter Biden’s laptop. The department continued to drag its feet until they finally released the documents on July 26, only five days after Biden announced that he was dropping out of the presidential race amid abysmal polling numbers that showed him getting crushed by former President Donald Trump.
The records show that Hunter Biden wrote at least one letter to the U.S. ambassador to Italy, John R. Phillips, asking if he could arrange a meeting between Burisma and the president of Tuscany, a region inside Italy.
Hunter Biden is set to face trial next month in another criminal case about evading paying taxes on millions of dollars that he made from Burisma and other foreign entities. The newspaper said that federal prosecutors recently indicated that they could file additional charges against the president’s son under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, since he was lobbying the U.S. government without being registered.
The Times said that the discovery was made in emails that the State Department released after a separate request for public records related to Hunter Biden’s contacts with officials at the U.S. Embassy in Romania about helping a real estate developer.
In a July 2016 email, Hunter Biden business partner Eric Schwerin wrote to Enrico Rossi, the then-president of the Tuscany regional government: “Burisma is hoping that some of its executives can get a meeting with the president to discuss their geothermal business in Tuscany.”
Hunter Biden’s letter was attached to the email, but the State Department redacted the entire letter.
A U.S. official in the Commerce Department said that the U.S. Ambassador to Italy already responded to one email from Hunter Biden and they thought he was “shopping for more support than he got here.”
While the Burisma project never got started in Tuscany, the newspaper conceded that it was unknown whether the U.S. Embassy ever “went to bat for Burisma.”
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