The New York Times: Hunter Biden asked State Department for help securing Burisma project in 2016

By Jack Forrest, CNN

(CNN) — Hunter Biden asked for help from the US State Department as he sought to make a deal for a Ukrainian gas company in Italy while his father was vice president, The New York Times reported Tuesday, citing documents and interviews.

According to The Times, Hunter Biden sent at least one letter to the US ambassador to Italy in 2016 on behalf of the company, Burisma, where he was a board member at the time. The outreach, a businessman involved in the project told the Times, came when the company was having difficulty securing regulatory approval for a geothermal project in Tuscany.

Officials at the US Embassy in Rome appeared uneasy, according to the Times, with one Commerce Department official writing in response, “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 official wrote.

Whether the US Embassy tried to help Burisma is unclear, but the project never broke ground in Tuscany, according to a person involved in the effort who spoke to The Times.

The new information about Hunter Biden’s work with Burisma, which was revealed in documents released to Times by the State Department in response to a 2021 public records request, comes amid his ongoing legal troubles and just weeks after President Joe Biden announced that he would not seek reelection.

A lawyer for Hunter Biden, Abbe Lowell, told The Times that his client “asked various people,” including John R. Phillips, the US ambassador to Italy at the time, if an introduction between Burisma and the president of the Tuscany region could be made.

“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 told The Times in a statement, calling it a “proper request” by Hunter Biden.

A White House spokesman told The Times that President Joe Biden was not aware of his son’s outreach to the US Embassy in Italy on behalf of Burisma while he was vice president.

CNN has reached out to Hunter Biden’s legal team and the State Department. A White House spokesman referred CNN’s request for comment to Hunter Biden’s personal representatives.

Hunter Biden’s connection to Burisma Holdings, as a board member for the energy company beginning in 2014, has come under fire from Republicans for years as they have sought to tie the president to his son’s business dealings. Those GOP efforts, however, were undercut when an FBI informant championed by congressional Republicans was charged earlier this year with lying about an alleged bribe that involved Burisma, then-Vice President Biden and his son.

CNN reported earlier this month that special counsel David Weiss’ team said Hunter Biden “agreed to attempt to influence U.S. public policy” by lobbying US agencies and officials to look for improprieties with the Romanian government’s investigation of a wealthy Romanian businessman.

Weiss also claimed in court filings that Hunter Biden “did reach out to government officials” in the US, including at the State Department — though prosecutors at the time did not elaborate on the details of those communications.

Prosecutors haven’t charged Hunter Biden with any foreign lobbying crimes, though they investigated him for years on that front. They signaled in the filings from earlier this month that they want to introduce new testimony about the alleged lobbying agreement as evidence in the tax case.

The revelations of Hunter Biden reaching out to the State Department come as Weiss is prosecuting him for alleged tax evasion. The case, scheduled for trial in September, touches on many of Hunter Biden’s controversial foreign business dealings, sometimes while his father was in office.

CNN’s Marshall Cohen, Hannah Rabinowitz and Evan Perez contributed to this report.

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