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