Normally you wouldn’t expect the New York Times to pursue a story that contains negative information about top-echelon Democrats, but lo and behold, on Tuesday evening the outlet dropped an article revealing that First Son Hunter Biden requested help from the U.S. Embassy in Rome to secure a lucrative deal for the Ukrainian gas giant, Burisma, whose board he famously sat on. Here’s the kicker: this was in 2016 while Joe Biden was vice president.
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According to the story, the president was unaware of his son’s efforts. One wonders if Joe knew that Hunter kept himself busy, shall we say, but told him not to share details so he’d have plausible deniability.
The records were released as a result of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the Times. I keep thinking to myself, wait, is this really the New York Times investigating things like this?
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.
Embassy officials appear to have been uneasy with the request from the son of the sitting vice president on behalf of a foreign company.
“I want to be careful about promising too much,” wrote a Commerce Department official based in the U.S. Embassy in Rome who was tasked with responding.
“This is a Ukrainian company and, purely to protect ourselves, U.S.G. should not be actively advocating with the government of Italy without the company going through the D.O.C. Advocacy Center,” the official wrote. Those acronyms refer to the United States government and a Department of Commerce program that supports American companies that seek business with foreign governments.
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Even though it’s nice to see the Times doing an actual investigation of Democrats, this next sentence is a wild understatement:
His outreach to the U.S. Embassy in Rome on behalf of Burisma, which has not been previously reported, echoes other episodes for which he has been criticized for implicitly leveraging his father’s political clout to try to advance his foreign business.
I might rephrase that as, “His outreach to the U.S. Embassy in Rome on behalf of Burisma, an effort which the Biden Department covered up, echoes many other episodes where there are mountains of evidence that the First Son improperly traded on the family name and his father’s position to enrich the Biden Crime Family and may have violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), and while Republicans have been busy investigating his shenanigans, the Democrats and most of the corrupt media have been willingly turning a blind eye.”
It’s all about the Benjamins:
Biden’s Family Has Every (Selfish) Reason to Want an Ailing Joe to Stay in the Race
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Graft, Corruption, International Bribery: the Biden Family Business
House Oversight Chair James Comer: ‘It’s No Secret Joe Biden’s Committed Many Crimes’
The timing of this document release certainly raises eyebrows—coming less than a month after Joe dropped out of the presidential race—but the Times and the State Department assure us it’s all just a coincidence. Sure. How convenient:
A State Department spokeswoman suggested that the timing was coincidental, noting that the department had released batches of documents in each of the last three months, before the tranche revealing Mr. Biden’s outreach to the U.S. Embassy in Rome.
A person familiar with the timing said the release of the Italy documents was planned by the State Department weeks before the president announced his decision and was cleared by the White House the week before Mr. Biden decided to drop out.
The State Department is notoriously slow when it comes to releasing public records. Its backlog of nearly 19,000 FOIA requests — some of which date back many years — at the end of fiscal year 2022 was the third largest in the federal government, according to a report issued by the Government Accountability Office this year.
Interestingly, the Department redacted Hunter’s letter in its entirety—due to privacy and legal concerns, they claimed—so the Times was unable to see its exact contents. I for one would be extremely curious to read it.
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The deal never did come to fruition, but this episode shows for the umpteenth time what many have been yelling from the rooftops for years: Joe Biden and Co. were knee-deep in corruption during his vice presidency (and perhaps afterward). This story is yet more evidence of that. One can only wonder how much more negative information about the Biden Family Business will start coming out now he is essentially a lame duck who barely shows up to work and no longer has the powerful influence he did until only very recently.