Concerns about the Biden family's lucrative influence-peddling and Hunter Biden’s potential violations of foreign agent registration laws have been raised for years, with little action from the Justice Department. The New York Times reports that evidence points to Hunter Biden operating as a foreign agent during the Obama years, when Joe Biden was vice president.

Hunter Biden Pardon Brings Renewed Scrutiny to Decade-Long Allegations of Influence-Peddling

In August, the New York Times reported that Hunter Biden had sought help from the U.S. government on behalf of Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company where he served as a board member. A more recent follow-up has surfaced new, potentially damaging details.

According to newly released records and interviews, Hunter Biden pursued U.S. government support for a potentially lucrative energy project in Italy while his father served as vice president.

These documents — withheld by the Biden administration for years — show that in 2016, Hunter Biden wrote at least one letter to the U.S. ambassador to Italy seeking assistance for Burisma. However, the State Department has not released the actual content of that letter.

This revelation raises renewed questions about why Hunter Biden has not faced charges for acting as an unregistered foreign agent — charges that have been brought against figures like Paul Manafort and Senator Bob Menendez under similar circumstances.

The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) requires anyone acting as an "agent of a foreign principal" to register with the U.S. government. This includes individuals who:

1. Attempt to influence federal officials or the public on behalf of a foreign entity or interest.
   
   

2. Collect or distribute money or other items of value in the U.S. for foreign clients, or
   
   

3. Represent the interests of a foreign principal before U.S. government officials or agencies.
   
   

The law casts a wide net—and so does its definition of a "foreign principal," which encompasses foreign governments, political parties, non-U.S. persons, and companies based or incorporated overseas.

As I’ve previously noted, Special Counsel Robert Mueller aggressively used FARA in prosecutions during the Trump-Russia investigation. Individuals like Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, and Rick Gates all faced FARA-related scrutiny or charges. The DOJ also raided the homes and offices of Rudy Giuliani and attorney Victoria Toensing under the same law.

Yet when it comes to Hunter Biden, the Justice Department—and Special Counsel David Weiss—appeared to go out of their way to avoid triggering FARA, despite clear evidence of his work for foreign clients.

The government also resisted transparency. In June 2021, the New York Times filed a FOIA request seeking records related to Hunter Biden’s dealings. After eight months of inaction, the Times sued. Eighteen months later, the State Department released thousands of documents—none of which revealed anything about Hunter’s outreach to U.S. officials. The Times challenged the release, pointing out that the agency had failed to include documents found in a cache linked to the infamous laptop Hunter Biden left at a Delaware repair shop.

Only recently—just after President Biden ended his re-election campaign and endorsed Vice President Harris—did the State Department release new documents. Among them was a previously unpublished letter from Hunter Biden, dated June 2016, written on Burisma letterhead and addressed to the U.S. ambassador to Italy.

In the letter, Hunter sought “support and guidance” in setting up a meeting between Burisma officials and Enrico Rossi, then-president of Tuscany's regional government. The goal was to resolve regulatory issues surrounding geothermal energy projects in Italy—projects that could have proved highly lucrative.

The letter is striking not just for its contents, but for the context: it was written while Joe Biden was still vice president. It references a meeting with the ambassador aboard Air Force Two, further blurring the lines between official travel and private business interests.

The ambassador later responded, indicating he knew President Rossi personally and referring Hunter to a Commerce Department official at the embassy who could assist in finding “overlapping interests.”

This looks like a textbook case of influence-peddling and lobbying on behalf of a foreign client—exactly the kind of conduct FARA was designed to regulate. Yet the Justice Department, so quick to invoke FARA in other political investigations, remained silent in Hunter Biden’s case.

While the media relentlessly pursued Trump over Russia and financial misconduct, many outlets dismissed or ignored mounting evidence of influence-peddling linked to the Biden family—going so far as to attack those of us raising these issues. Instead of investigating, they insisted there was "no evidence" and looked the other way.

Now, with this letter finally in the open, it’s fair to ask: how could any serious investigator read it and not recognize the glaring double standard?

Even The New York Times—which deserves credit for pushing through the FOIA process—ultimately did little with the substantial evidence pointing to Biden family influence-peddling and the millions they secured through it.

What remains is not just a scandal about what the Bidens did, but also about what the Justice Department failed to do over the course of several years. Instead of following leads from whistle blowers, the department seemed more in line with political voices like former Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), who once said, “everybody needs to back off” the influence-peddling story.

President Biden, for his part, broke his repeated promise not to pardon his son. But what stood out most was the sweeping nature of that pardon—not only covering alleged crimes ranging from tax evasion to human trafficking, but also spanning a full decade, from January 1, 2014, to December 1, 2024.

The newly released letter helps explain why such a broad and far-reaching pardon was deemed necessary.

In the end, the most damning conclusion to be drawn from this scandal isn’t just about the actions of Hunter Biden—but about the inaction and selective enforcement by the very institution charged with upholding the law: the Justice Department.