Hunter Biden Asks US Ambassador for Help on Italian Business Deal – Deseret News

Hunter Biden reportedly approached a U.S. government official for help with a business deal in Italy when his father was vice president.

According to publicly available State Department documents obtained by The New York Times, Hunter Biden asked the U.S. ambassador to Italy for help on behalf of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company where he was a board member.

The embassy official responded by saying, “I want to be careful not to overpromise,” adding, “This is a Ukrainian company and, strictly to protect itself, USG should not actively seek the support of the Italian government without the DOC Advocacy Center as a proxy.”

Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Hunter Biden, said John R. Phillips, then the U.S. ambassador to Italy, was one of several people the president’s son approached in hopes of introducing the company to a senior Italian official.

“There was no meeting, no project, no request for anything in the United States, only a request for implementation in Italy,” Lowell said, according to the report. The White House has maintained that President Biden was not aware of his son’s efforts.

Hunter Biden Could Be Charged With Lobbying

Last week, the office of special counsel David Weiss, who brought tax and firearms charges against Hunter Biden, accused the younger Biden of accepting money from a Romanian businessman in exchange for influencing U.S. government agencies while his father was vice president, ABC News reported.

Prosecutors plan to present evidence of Hunter Biden’s dealings with Gabriel Popoviciu, an Eastern European businessman, during the younger Biden’s upcoming trial on tax charges, according to court records. The filings also say Hunter Biden contacted government officials, including the State Department.

He has not been charged with being an unregistered lobbyist, but the trial scheduled for September will focus on the Biden family’s business ties, which have been under investigation for several years.

Rep. James Comer, a Kentucky Republican who led a congressional investigation into Hunter Biden as chairman of the House Oversight Committee, responded to the court documents by calling the news “the biggest corruption scandal in the history of our … lifetimes” in an appearance on Newsmax.

Commentators have also questioned the timing of the State Department’s decision to release documents damaging to the Biden family, just weeks after President Biden withdrew his re-election bid.

“One of the other things that The New York Times is reporting is that this document was suddenly ripped out of the American bureaucracy the week that President Biden dropped out of the race,” CNN host Kasie Hunt said on a panel Wednesday. “They claim it was a coincidence.”

Edward-Issac Dovere also responded to Hunter Biden’s lawyers’ response, saying they simply stated that he did nothing wrong.

“People find it very strange that the vice president’s son would send letters and make requests to other government officials, saying, ‘Hey, can you meet with this company?'” he added.