Now It Can Be Told: Letter Reveals What Hunter Biden was Doing for Burisma

Yesterday the NY Times published a follow up to a story about Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma while his father Joe Biden was Vice President. The original story was published last August and Ed wrote about it here. Here’s a bit of what Ken Vogel reported at the time:

Hunter Biden sought assistance from the U.S. government for a potentially lucrative energy project in Italy while his father was vice president, according to newly released records and interviews.

The records, which the Biden administration had withheld for years, indicate that Hunter Biden wrote at least one letter to the U.S. ambassador to Italy in 2016 seeking assistance for the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, where he was a board member…

The State Department did not release the actual text of the letter.

Essentially, this was proof that Hunter had been acting as an unregistered foreign agent while his father was VP. But just as significant as the story was the timing of it. The NY Times had been trying to get the information though an FOIA request for years.

The request was initially filed under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, in June 2021. After nearly eight months, the State Department had not released any records, and The Times sued. About 18 months later, the department moved to close the case after releasing thousands of pages of records — none of which shed light on Hunter Biden’s outreach to the U.S. government.

The Times challenged the thoroughness of the search, noting that the department had failed to produce responsive records contained in a cache of files connected to a laptop that Mr. Biden had abandoned at a Delaware repair shop. The department resumed the search and periodic productions, but had produced few documents related to Mr. Biden until the week after his father ended his re-election campaign and endorsed Vice President Harris for the Democratic nomination.

So the Times did finally get some incriminating documents related to Hunter’s outreach to the US ambassador but those documents were released one week after Joe Biden announced he was stepping down as the Democratic nominee. The State Department claimed that timing was just a coincidence but let’s just face it, they were lying. It’s definitely not a coincidence that evidence that showed Hunter Biden was trading on his fathers name was hidden for three years and finally revealed a week after he left the race. Sorry, no one is going to ever believe that.

As mentioned, even then they didn’t release the actual letter Hunter Biden sent. And that’s what yesterday’s follow-up is about. Ken Vogel finally got a copy of Hunter’s letter.

The State Department last week released a letter that Hunter Biden wrote while his father was serving as vice president in which he sought assistance from the U.S. government for the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.

In the previously unpublished June 2016 letter on Burisma letterhead to the U.S. ambassador to Italy, Mr. Biden requested “support and guidance” in arranging a meeting with an Italian official to resolve regulatory hurdles to geothermal energy projects Burisma was pursuing in the Tuscany region…

The letter requested help arranging a meeting between Burisma officials and Enrico Rossi, the president of the Tuscany regional government at the time, “to introduce geothermal projects led by Burisma Group, to highlight their social and economic benefits for local communities and develop a common action plan that would lead to further development of the Tuscany Region.”

In the letter, Hunter mentioned meeting the ambassador on a recent trip to Rome. That trip was apparently a trip on which Hunter accompanied his father the Vice President and spent time with the ambassador on a shared plane trip home on Air Force Two. The ambassador sent a follow up letter saying he knew the president of Tuscany and had designated a Commerce Department official working at the US embassy to “see where our interests may overlap.” Allegedly the meeting between Hunter and the Tuscany official never happened and the deal apparently fell apart.

The official response to all of this now is either silence or a claim that nobody knew this was happening.

A Burisma representative did not respond to requests for comment. A spokeswoman for former President Biden declined to comment.

Last summer, a Biden White House spokesman said the elder Mr. Biden was not aware when he was vice president that his son had contacted the United States Embassy in Italy on behalf of Burisma.

It sure looks like Hunter was trading on his father’s name and influence and that the State Dept. sat on the evidence until Joe Biden was a lame duck no longer running for president. But even if that’s true, there’s nothing that can be done about it now. The pardon Joe Biden granted Hunter before leaving office goes back to 2014, right around the time Hunter started working for Burisma and two years before this letter was sent. So Hunter is in the clear, no matter what documents the State Department releases next.