Hunter Biden investigation: DOJ enforced foreign lobbying rules on Hunter’s business partners

Hunter Biden worked closely with multiple people who disclosed their lobbying for foreign companies under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, raising questions about whether he broke the law by not registering himself for doing the same work.

He also lobbied U.S. officials, alongside many others who did not register under FARA, for work that, emails show, clearly involved advocacy that would trigger the FARA requirements.

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The focus on Hunter Biden’s foreign lobbying grew more intense this week when a judge in Delaware pressed prosecutors about whether they were still investigating the president’s son for alleged FARA violations.

A day in court that was supposed to mark the end of Hunter Biden’s legal troubles may have been the start of even more, as the judge rejected a plea deal on Wednesday that Hunter Biden believed would shield him from prosecution for his foreign business dealings.

Some of the individuals at a firm that worked with Hunter Biden in advocating Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company whose board Hunter Biden joined in 2014, registered their work under FARA after apparent prodding from the Justice Department.

Their firm, Blue Star Strategies, was under investigation by the DOJ at the time.

Why they were permitted to file foreign lobbying disclosures years after the work took place, rather than face penalties for their failure to do so, remains unclear.

Sally Painter and Karen Tramontano, the Blue Star Strategies consultants whose emails reflect a close working relationship with Hunter Biden on Burisma, registered as foreign lobbyists representing Burisma’s chief, Mykola Zlochevsky, in 2022. Zlochevsky was under criminal investigation in Ukraine.

Tramontano and Painter disclosed to the government that they helped set up meetings between Zlochevsky’s attorney and State Department officials, according to FARA documents.

Those meetings occurred in 2016, while Joe Biden was still vice president.

Blue Star Strategies, Hunter Biden, and Hunter Biden’s business partners worked closely to boost Burisma’s image across many fronts, including by working to have the Ukrainian company’s Wikipedia page scrubbed of negative press, strategizing about how to navigate court hearings as Zlochevsky battled a criminal investigation into his dealings, and partnering on a proposal for what the team could offer Zlochevsky in terms of a lobbying campaign.

Blue Star Strategies did not register under FARA in real-time, and the consultants’ work with Burisma had come to the attention of investigators on the Hunter Biden case, according to IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley.

Shapley testified to Congress that the Justice Department slow-walked a search warrant for Blue Star Strategies’s emails in 2020 and that Lesley Wolf, a prosecutor in the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office accused of misconduct, told investigators “it would likely not get approved.”

“This was a significant blow to the Foreign Agents Registration Act piece of the investigation,” Shapley said.

But the FARA documents Painter and Tramontano did eventually file suggest that specific meetings and contacts in which Hunter Biden was involved met the Justice Department’s definition of foreign lobbying.

For example, one of the meetings that Blue Star Strategies arranged on behalf of Zlochevsky was with an Obama State Department official named Amos Hochstein in 2016.

Emails show Hunter Biden was also in contact with Hochstein during his time on the Burisma board and that he met with Hochstein in 2015.

Hunter Biden appeared to have attempted to work with another associate whose foreign lobbying required disclosure under FARA while his father was vice president.

In 2010, Hunter Biden told that associate, Mark Doyle, that he would stack a trip to meet the president of Serbia and other wealthy Serbians at the end of his father’s official travel to Spain.

“JRB will be in Madrid and I can catch a ride with him and fly over to Serbia and back with you,” Hunter Biden wrote to Mark Doyle, a registered foreign lobbyist, in April 2010.

The meetings were ostensibly about locking down more investments for his firm.

Like Blue Star Strategies, Doyle disclosed his work for the Serbian government in FARA filings.

Hunter Biden was eager to get involved with the Serbian project, emailing Doyle that he wanted “to get this started right away.”

“Whom should I be laying the ground work [sic] with?” Hunter Biden wrote in 2011. “IMF, World Bank, Ambassadors?”

Doyle also appears to have attempted to put together a deal between Hunter Biden and the Saudi Business Council in 2011, when Hunter Biden’s associates requested so much money for the president’s son that the broker, a Nigerian businessman, balked at the figure.

The Justice Department has also brought criminal charges over a FARA violation involving work with a Chinese company that paid Hunter Biden hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Gal Luft, a think tank director who’d made headlines for claiming to have evidence of crimes committed by the Biden family, was indicted on charges of FARA violations and other crimes earlier this month.

Luft’s FARA charges stemmed from his unregistered lobbying for CEFC, a Chinese energy company that, according to Luft’s indictment, the Justice Department accused of running an influence campaign in the U.S. during the years Hunter Biden also worked with it, according to Luft’s indictment.

Hunter Biden’s income from ventures with CEFC executives came up in court on Wednesday when the judge asked him to clarify some of the complicated financial structures he created around his foreign lobbying work.

The work with CEFC involved President Joe Biden’s brother, James Biden, as well as Hunter Biden.

In one 2017 email, a CEFC executive asked one of Hunter Biden’s business associates to “please convey his greetings to The B Family, their support is the base of CEFC’s further development.”

The Chinese company was looking to expand its energy business and its influence globally, including in the U.S.

Luft is not the only person to face criminal charges over working for CEFC from 2015 to 2017 – the same years that Hunter Biden and James Biden collected checks from it.

Patrick Ho, head of a U.S.-based organization backed by CEFC, was sentenced to three years in prison in 2019 for helping CEFC pay bribes in pursuit of business opportunities.

Luft has alleged that prosecutors removed all references to Hunter Biden and the Biden family from emails that were used during Ho’s trial; Hunter Biden was reportedly the first person Ho attempted to call after his 2017 arrest.

Prosecutors on Hunter Biden’s case said in court on Wednesday that Hunter Biden received a $1 million payment from Ho in March 2018 for legal fees.

But while Luft and Ho faced charges over their work for CEFC, Hunter Biden has not.

Shapley, the IRS whistleblower, provided Congress with a transcript of the FBI’s interview with Rob Walker, a close Hunter Biden business associate, in which Walker admitted that Joe Biden attended a meeting with CEFC executives at the Four Seasons in Washington, D.C., once out of office.

Walker also said Hunter Biden set up meetings involving his father when Joe Biden was still vice president, but the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware had barred investigators from asking any questions about Joe Biden’s involvement.

In addition to lobbying for the Ukrainian and Chinese companies, Hunter Biden also lobbied for a powerful Romanian businessman, emails show, in work that he did not register under FARA.

Hunter Biden appears to have met with the then-U.S. ambassador to Romania, written him a letter, and worked on proposals to send to the ambassador as he and several of his close partners, including Walker, lobbied to shield Romanian real estate magnate Gabriel Popoviciu from criminal prosecution.

Hunter Biden and his partners repeatedly worked their contacts in the State Department for advice and introductions that could help Popoviciu, emails show.

Rob Walker appears to have collected $3 million from Popoviciu, bank records obtained by the House Oversight Committee show, and distributed a third of that to Hunter Biden, Hallie Biden, “and an unknown ‘Biden’ account,” the committee said.

In a statement to the New York Times in 2019, Hunter Biden’s lawyer characterized his client’s work with Popoviciu as involving little more than a referral to another attorney.

The emails show Hunter Biden actually worked State Department contacts on Popoviciu’s behalf.

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All of the foreign entanglements could place Hunter Biden at risk of facing FARA-related charges, to say nothing of the more serious allegations of money laundering and bribery that witnesses have raised.

The Justice Department began cracking down on FARA violations more aggressively during the Trump administration, ensnaring some of Donald Trump’s associates in the process.