While Joe Biden was vice president, his son used the letterhead of a Ukrainian energy company when writing to a U.S. ambassador with ties to the family.
The State Department last week released a letter that Hunter Biden wrote while his father was serving as vice president in which he sought assistance from the U.S. government for the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
In the previously unpublished June 2016 letter on Burisma letterhead to the U.S. ambassador to Italy, Mr. Biden requested “support and guidance” in arranging a meeting with an Italian official to resolve regulatory hurdles to geothermal energy projects Burisma was pursuing in the Tuscany region.
In a response letter also released by the State Department last week, the ambassador, John R. Phillips, indicated that he had dispatched a Commerce Department official to assist with the request.
The letters shed more light on an episode The New York Times had previously revealed.
Mr. Biden began his letter by referring to an interaction with the ambassador, writing, “It was great seeing you in Rome recently.”
The letter did not mention then-Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., nor did it specify when Hunter Biden saw the ambassador in Rome. He had traveled there at least twice with his father in the preceding months.
In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Phillips said that he did not view the letter as an effort to invoke the elder Mr. Biden in order to compel the embassy to help Burisma. Rather, Mr. Phillips said, he interpreted it as a reference to a Biden family trip to Rome over the Thanksgiving holiday in 2015, during which the younger Mr. Biden had spent time with the ambassador.