The newspaper is seeking embassy emails mentioning the president’s son and his associates
The New York Times is suing the US State Department to obtain official communications mentioning several people involved in the political scandal over Hunter Biden and his allegedly corrupt business dealings, Politico has reported.
In its Monday filing, the NYT accused the diplomatic service of dragging its feet on releasing the materials and wants to get them sooner than the April 2023 deadline proposed by Foggy Bottom.
The Times wants to study emails from the US embassy in Romania, which mention Biden himself and several of his business partners, including Tony Bobulinski. The latter made headlines in late October 2020 during the presidential campaign, when he became a source of allegations of corruption against then-candidate Joe Biden.
Bobulinski confirmed the authenticity of emails, based on which the New York Post published several reports about Hunter Biden’s personal habits and questionable business practices. He also went on Fox News to accuse Joe Biden of personal entanglement in a shady 2017 venture in China, but wouldn’t provide any affirmative evidence of the claim.
The stories were widely dismissed at the time by a large part of the US establishment as a failed GOP ‘October surprise’, possibly originating as a Russian propaganda plant. Legacy media cheered as Big Tech put the brakes on the dissemination of the Post’s ‘Hunter laptop’ coverage, with Twitter going as far as banning users from sharing links to the initial story.
The Trump campaign doubled down on the accusations, with his attorney Rudy Giuliani leading the charge. The Times’ Freedom of Information request to the State Department also seeks materials mentioning Giuliani. The newspaper appears to be looking for evidence of possible misappropriation of government resources to benefit private business interests and possible violations of Foreign Agents Registration Act rules, Politico said.
When asked about its legal battle with the State Department, the Times said it was “a routine part” of their journalists’ search for “potentially newsworthy information from a variety of sources.” The newspaper expressed hope that the documents it requested would be released promptly.
