Redacted emails from then-Vice President Joe Biden’s office suggest a close Biden family associate, who went on to work under Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, was involved in conversations about how to shape stories related to Hunter Biden’s work for Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
Alexander Mackler was a legal counsel to Joe Biden at the time. He later spent years working in the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office, including during the first few months of the Hunter Biden criminal investigation.
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In one Dec. 8, 2015, email released recently by the National Archives and Records Administration, Mackler and Joe Biden’s then-Communications Director Kate Bedingfield appeared to discuss a story published that day in the New York Times about Hunter Biden’s role at Burisma.
The entire email was redacted by the Biden administration.
In the days leading up to the unflattering New York Times story and another on the same topic in the Wall Street Journal, Mackler was copied on discussions about how to respond. Some of those emails were also redacted.
The messages came under fresh scrutiny Wednesday when House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) sent a letter to the National Archives demanding unredacted versions of emails involving discussions of Hunter Biden’s business.
Comer said the National Archives presently has the ability to withhold any emails it deems unrelated to Joe Biden’s business as vice president, meaning some communications with Hunter Biden’s business associates may have already been withheld from the tranches of emails the National Archives has been slowly releasing for months.
However, at least some of the messages do show close coordination between Joe Biden’s political aides and Hunter Biden’s business.
Emails from early December 2015 show Bedingfield worked with Eric Schwerin, one of Hunter Biden’s closest business partners, to come up with a response from the then-vice president’s office to reporters who were asking about Burisma.
Schwerin even corrected a typo in one of Bedingfield’s draft statements and offered guidance on how Bedingfield should coax one reporter into softening a story about Hunter Biden’s work.
Private emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop show that Schwerin was coordinating with a Burisma executive, Hunter Biden, and their other business partner, Devon Archer, at the same time he was working out a response with Joe Biden’s office.
During a court hearing over Hunter Biden’s now-withdrawn plea deal in July, Schwerin was described as Hunter Biden’s “most significant professional relationship.”
Mackler’s inclusion in sensitive internal conversations about Hunter Biden’s Burisma work in 2015 is significant because he went on to work on a prosecutorial team conducting a criminal investigation of that same work.
The criminal investigation, which began at the IRS in 2018 and was under Weiss’s supervision by at least January 2019, examined the details of how Hunter Biden and his business partners earned millions of dollars from Burisma starting in 2014 and what they did with the money.
It is unclear whether Mackler recused himself from the Hunter Biden case before he left Weiss’s office in May 2019. Emails from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop show Mackler considered Hunter Biden a close friend and stayed in regular contact with him, even joking with Hunter Biden and Schwerin about the email policy at Weiss’s office on his first day of work there in 2016.
The National Archives emails about Hunter Biden’s Burisma work are also significant because of when they were sent.
In December 2015, Joe Biden was heading to Ukraine for high-profile meetings with Ukrainian leaders. He delivered a speech in Kyiv in which he called for Ukraine to do more to fight corruption, and some of the press coverage surrounding his visit focused on how Hunter Biden’s position on the Burisma board undercut Joe Biden’s credibility on the subject.
Mackler was privately in contact with Hunter Biden during that time, even as he continued in his role in the vice president’s office. In November 2015, for example, Mackler reached out using a private email address and asked Hunter Biden to offer his thoughts on what Joe Biden might do with his post-vice presidency.
On the days in early December 2015 when the flurry of emails swirled about how to handle negative press involving Hunter Biden and Burisma, Hunter Biden was in Dubai meeting with Burisma executives, his schedule shows.
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During that visit to Dubai, according to testimony to the Oversight Committee from Archer, Burisma executives pressured Hunter Biden to “call D.C.” about the Ukrainian investigations into alleged corruption at the company.
Archer at first testified that Hunter Biden and Burisma executives stepped away from a meeting to call Joe Biden, but Archer’s lawyer later instructed him to clarify that he was unsure whether the call was specifically to the then-vice president.
