Hunter Biden reached out the U.S. government to help with an energy project involving Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings during his father’s vice presidency, according to a new report.
The younger Biden reached out to the U.S. ambassador to Italy in 2016 to see if the diplomat could assist him with a project Burisma was exploring, the New York Times reported based on records and interviews.
U.S. officials were not comfortable with the request, given the fact that the vice president’s son was requesting assistance on behalf of a foreign company.
“This is a Ukrainian company and, purely to protect ourselves, [the U.S. government] should not be actively advocating with the government of Italy without the company going through the [Department of Commerce’s] Advocacy Center,” a Commerce Department official wrote, according to the Times.
At the time, Hunter Biden was a board member of Burisma. The company was paying him more than $80,000 per month, or roughly $1 million per year, according to bank records and the federal tax indictment against Biden. Burisma hired Hunter Biden in 2014 when his father, then-vice president Joe Biden, was the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine policy.
Hunter Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, told the Times that his client asked the sitting U.S. ambassador to Italy and others if they could set up meetings between Burisma and the president of Tuscany, the location of a geothermal energy project Burisma was exploring.
“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,” Lowell said. A White House spokesman told the Times that Joe Biden was not aware of his son’s outreach.
National Review has reached out to the White House for further comment.
When Joe Biden was vice president, Burisma hired lobbying firm Blue Star Strategies and high-powered attorney John Buretta to make inroads with Obama administration officials, according to retroactively filed Foreign Agents Registration Act documents and a trove of whistleblower documents released last year by IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler. Burisma entered into the agreement with Blue Star upon recommendation from Hunter Biden and his business partners, emails show.
Both IRS agents spent years on the Hunter Biden tax case before coming forward last year with serious allegations of misconduct against Justice Department officials. Witness testimony corroborated the whistleblower allegations, House Republicans said in a lengthy report last year.
House Republicans have investigated the extent of now-President Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s foreign business dealings for the impeachment inquiry against him. Earlier this year, Hunter Biden testified that his father did speak to and meet with his business partners, but downplayed the significance of the encounters.
Hunter Biden and his uncle James Biden, a former business partner, both testified that Joe Biden played no role in their foreign business dealings. Joe Biden has consistently denied playing any role in his son’s business enterprises.
Other former business partners of his have also testified about meetings with Joe Biden at various points over the last decade when Hunter and his associates were making large sums of money from their foreign business dealings.
Next month, Hunter Biden is set to stand trial on nine federal tax charges stemming from his alleged failure to pay over $1.4 million in taxes over a four-year period. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges. Special counsel David Weiss and his team are carrying out the prosecution in California federal court.
In court papers filed last week, federal prosecutors accused Hunter Biden and his business partners of agreeing to lobby U.S. officials on behalf of Romanian businessman Gabriel Popoviciu, who was facing corruption charges in his home country. Biden and one of his business partners created an agreement with Popoviciu to conceal the true nature of the business relationship and protect Joe Biden from scrutiny, prosecutors alleged. Biden’s attorneys have disputed prosecutors’ accusations and accused them of distorting the evidence in their position to generate media attention.
Popoviciu paid Hunter Biden’s business partner Rob Walker roughly $3 million from November 2015 to May 2017 over a series of incremental payments, bank records show. All but one of the payments happened during Joe Biden’s vice presidency. A third of the money went to Hunter Biden.
Emails from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop archive and his foreign business dealings will likely feature at the tax trial to demonstrate the income he made over the relevant timeframe and his repeated failure to pay his taxes in a timely manner.
Weiss and his team secured a conviction against Hunter Biden on three federal gun charges in June after a short trial. Biden’s sentencing for the gun charges is scheduled for November.