{"id":106775,"date":"2024-08-14T12:04:14","date_gmt":"2024-08-14T12:04:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lascrucestoday.com\/newstalklc\/hunter-biden-sought-help-from-us-ambassador-for-burisma-lawyer-confirms\/"},"modified":"2024-08-14T12:04:14","modified_gmt":"2024-08-14T12:04:14","slug":"hunter-biden-sought-help-from-us-ambassador-for-burisma-lawyer-confirms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lascrucestoday.com\/newstalklc\/hunter-biden-sought-help-from-us-ambassador-for-burisma-lawyer-confirms\/","title":{"rendered":"Hunter Biden sought help from US ambassador for Burisma, lawyer confirms"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/s3.amazonaws.com\/syndication.abcaudio.com\/files\/2024-08-14\/GettyImages-2156401704_1723606450996_hpMain.jpg\" alt><figcaption>Hunter Biden, the son of U.S. President Joe Biden, leaves the J. Caleb Boggs Federal Building on June 06, 2024 in Wilmington, Delaware. (Kevin Dietsch\/Getty Images)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>(WASHINGTON) &#8212; Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, attempted to enlist support from the U.S. Ambassador to Italy in 2016 to arrange a business meeting on behalf of Burisma for a prospective energy deal, according to his attorney.<\/p>\n<p><em>The New York Times <\/em>first reported the overture, which occurred during Joe Biden&#8217;s time as vice president.<\/p>\n<p>In a statement to ABC News on Tuesday night, Abbe Lowell, an attorney for Hunter Biden, characterized Hunter Biden&#8217;s letter to John Phillips, the U.S. ambassador in Rome at the time, seeking a &#8220;simple introduction&#8221; as a &#8220;normal and proper practice.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;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,&#8221; Lowell said.<\/p>\n<p><em>The New York Times<\/em> reported that it had secured records related to Hunter Biden&#8217;s request after a lengthy legal fight with the State Department. The newspaper said in Tuesday&#8217;s news article that it initially filed the request for these records in June 2021 and later sued when the department failed to turn them over.<\/p>\n<p>The <em>Times<\/em> also reported that a State Department official said the timing of the release of these particular documents &#8212; just weeks after Joe Biden ended his presidential campaign &#8212; was a coincidence.<\/p>\n<p>The actual text of Hunter Biden&#8217;s 2016 letter to Ambassador John Phillips was not included in the documents obtained by the <em>Times<\/em>. But according to Lowell, Hunter Biden reached out to the embassy to see &#8220;if they could make a simple introduction of Burisma&#8217;s Geothermal company to the President of Tuscany where such projects were being considered.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The response Hunter Biden received from an embassy aide suggested unease with official U.S. cooperation.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I want to be careful about promising too much,&#8221; a Commerce Department official based in Rome replied to Hunter Biden, according to the <em>Times<\/em>. &#8220;This is a Ukrainian company and, purely to protect ourselves, [U.S. government] should not be actively advocating with the government of Italy without the company going through the [Commerce Department] Advocacy Center.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Hunter Biden sat on the board of Burisma for nearly five years and earned more than $2 million from the energy firm during that time, according to court records filed as part of his tax case in California.<\/p>\n<p>This latest revelation builds on recent allegations that Hunter Biden attempted to leverage his proximity to power for business gains.<\/p>\n<p>Last week, prosecutors contended in court filings that the younger Biden accepted payments from a Romanian businessman who wanted him to &#8220;influence U.S. government agencies&#8221; while his father was vice president.<\/p>\n<p>Lawyers for Hunter Biden criticized the allegations related to the Romanian businessman in court filings.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The Special Counsel&#8217;s unnecessary change of tactic merely echoes the baseless and false allegations of foreign wrongdoing which have been touted by House Republicans to use Mr. Biden&#8217;s proper business activities in Romania and elsewhere to attack him and his father,&#8221; attorneys for Hunter Biden wrote.<\/p>\n<p>In related news, Hunter Biden first addressed his role at Burisma in an interview with ABC News in Oct. 2019. He acknowledged at the time that he would &#8220;probably not&#8221; have been offered the role at Burisma if his last name hadn\u2019t been Biden, but insisted he &#8220;did nothing wrong at all&#8221; by accepting overseas work while his father was vice president.<\/p>\n<p>The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n<p>Copyright \u00a9 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hunter Biden, the son of U.S. President Joe Biden, leaves the J. Caleb Boggs Federal Building on June 06, 2024 in Wilmington, Delaware. (Kevin Dietsch\/Getty Images) (WASHINGTON) &#8212; Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, attempted to enlist support from the U.S. Ambassador to Italy in 2016 to arrange<span class=\"more-link\"><a href=\"https:\/\/lascrucestoday.com\/newstalklc\/hunter-biden-sought-help-from-us-ambassador-for-burisma-lawyer-confirms\/\">Read More &rarr;<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[156,31,2],"tags":[273,271,276,274,270,123,275,133,124,272,102,103],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lascrucestoday.com\/newstalklc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106775"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lascrucestoday.com\/newstalklc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lascrucestoday.com\/newstalklc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lascrucestoday.com\/newstalklc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lascrucestoday.com\/newstalklc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lascrucestoday.com\/newstalklc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106775\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lascrucestoday.com\/newstalklc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lascrucestoday.com\/newstalklc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lascrucestoday.com\/newstalklc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}