- by foxnews
- 25 Nov 2024
Hunter Biden lobbied the US government for help in securing a lucrative energy contract in Italy while his father Joe Biden was vice-president, newly released documents show.
The request was revealed in documents issued by the US state department following a protracted effort by the New York Times seeking their release that lasted more than three years.
The revelations come as Hunter Biden prepares to stand trial in California next month on charges of tax evasion on his income from Burisma and other foreign businesses.
They follow his conviction in June on charges of illegal gun ownership during a time when he was using crack cocaine.
The pursuit of Biden has lost much of its political sting since his withdrawal from the presidential race last month, after weeks of pressure from fellow Democrats following a disastrous debate performance.
The New York Times reported that the decision to release the documents containing the latest revelations was taken weeks before Biden stepped aside in favour of the vice-president, Kamala Harris, meaning that it was unlikely that the documents had been deliberately withheld until they had become less politically damaging. The White House signed off on the release a week before the president announced his withdrawal, the paper reported.
The state department has a track record of being slow to release records in response to requests. The Times said it had challenged the thoroughness of previous releases because they failed to include files stored in a laptop that Hunter Biden had left at a computer repair shop in Delaware.
It elicited a cautious response from US officials at the embassy and there is no evidence that a meeting ever took place as a result.
Enrico Rossi, the president of the Tuscan regional government at the time, told the New York Times that he never met Hunter Biden and had no recollection of the US embassy contacting about the Burisma project.
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