Hunter Biden’s Ukraine Work Raised Concerns With Obama Officials, GOP-Led Probe Confirms

Findings don’t support Trump’s accusation that Joe Biden sought to remove a prosecutor to protect a gas firm whose board Hunter Biden served on.

Two Obama administration officials raised concerns to the White House in 2015 about Hunter Biden serving on the board of a Ukrainian natural-gas company while his father, then Vice President Joe Biden, led U.S. policy efforts toward the country, a Senate investigation by Republicans concluded.

The GOP-led probe shows that officials working on U.S.-Ukraine relations saw Hunter Biden’s position as creating the perception of a conflict of interest with his father’s work. The findings, outlined in an 87-page report, don’t support a central accusation President Trump and other Republicans have made about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s duties in Ukraine: that he sought the removal of the country’s top prosecutor to protect the gas company, Burisma Holdings, from investigation.

“Hunter Biden’s position on Burisma’s board cast a shadow over the work of those advancing anticorruption reforms in Ukraine,” the report says.

Both Bidens have denied wrongdoing.

Andrew Bates, a spokesman for the Biden campaign, said prior to the report’s release that Sen. Ron Johnson, the Republican chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee who led the probe, was using committee resources to “subsidize a foreign attack against the sovereignty of our elections with taxpayer dollars—an attack founded on a long-disproven, hard-core right-wing conspiracy theory.” An attorney for Hunter Biden didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

With the report, Republicans on the Homeland Security and Finance committees sought to return a spotlight to the work the Bidens did in Ukraine, renewing a partisan battle over an issue that was central to Mr. Trump’s impeachment weeks before the presidential election. Mr. Trump’s attempt last year to press the Ukrainian president to investigate the Bidens led to his impeachment in the Democrat-led House, which ended with acquittal in the GOP-controlled Senate.