Republican senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson sent a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday asking the State Department to disclose any internal documents involving Hunter Biden and his Ukrainian firm Burisma Holdings.
The letter follows the release of documents by investigative journalist John Solomon, who revealed that Biden and his business partner Devon Archer joined Burisma despite the warnings of colleague Christopher Heinz, the stepson to former secretary of state John Kerry. Later, both Biden and Archer scheduled meetings with senior State Department officials, according to email records obtained by Solomon.
“It is unclear the extent to which State Department officials expressed these concerns formally and what, if any, action the Department took to address them,” the letter reads. The two senators ask in the letter for documents “to better understand what actions, if any, the Obama administration took to ensure that policy decisions relating to Ukraine and Burisma were not improperly influenced by the employment and financial interests of family members.”
Grassley and Johnson’s interest centers around three apparent meetings in 2015 and 2016. In 2015, Biden asked on two separate occasions to meet with then-Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken for “advice,” according to email records.
Another email shows a scheduled meeting between former under secretary Catherine Novelli and Karen Tramontano, a former Clinton administration official and co-founder of Blue Star Strategies, an American lobbying firm hired by Burisma to help improve its American image. In the email, Tramontano mentioned Biden by name in an effort to secure a meeting with Novelli about Burisma.
A third email thread shows that Archer planed to meet with Kerry one day after the Novelli-Tramontano meeting.
In their letter, Grassley and Johnson ask for all records relating to the three meetings.