While his father, Joseph R. Biden Jr., was vice president, Hunter Biden began developing relationships that led to an audacious proposal to sell the land around the United States Embassy building in Romania to a group that included a Chinese company.
Hunter Biden was involved in the proposed deal from multiple perspectives, creating what he privately acknowledged to an associate was an ethical quagmire, according to documents and four people with knowledge of the matter who were not authorized to speak about it.
Even after years of investigations, and a suggestion by federal prosecutors that Mr. Biden’s work in Romania left him vulnerable to a foreign lobbying charge, the full story of his efforts there has not been told before. Previously unreported details exemplify how Mr. Biden’s pursuit of lucrative foreign deals fit into the broader foreign influence industry and complicated U.S. diplomacy.
The deal he was pursuing left open the possibility that the Chinese could have ended up with an ownership stake in a critical asset — the land around the embassy in Bucharest, and possibly the land on which the embassy sat. The possibility concerned one of his former partners who sought to avoid the outcome at the time, while another partner later rejected the idea that it was ever on the table.
The chapter fits into a well-worn playbook used by deep-pocketed foreign interests to seek favor in Washington by courting politically connected Americans, including presidential family members like the adult sons of President Trump or the son and brother of former President Jimmy Carter.
Hunter Biden’s dealings in Romania began when his father was vice president, but the land deal did not take shape until the elder Mr. Biden left that office. Some of Hunter Biden’s foreign dealings attracted wide attention when his father ran for president in 2020, and became a major political and legal issue during the Biden presidency, though the Romania effort remains relatively unknown.
Hunter Biden had dual roles in the enterprise.
One was as a businessman. He and his partners, including his father’s younger brother James Biden, were stakeholders in a venture that was to co-own developed properties and vacant land around the embassy in Bucharest. Joining them was the wealthy Romanian who had developed the area and an influential Chinese state-linked company, which Hunter Biden was courting.
The other role was as legal counsel. While these negotiations were going on, Mr. Biden was separately working as a lawyer and adviser for that same Romanian developer, Gabriel Popoviciu. His legal team was trying to stymie a corruption case in Romania related to the purchase of the land years earlier.
“We have an interest it seems from every possible angle,” Mr. Biden wrote in a WhatsApp message to one of his partners in May 2017 that was reviewed by a reporter for The New York Times.
In the message chain, Mr. Biden conceded that he probably could not continue as a lawyer for Mr. Popoviciu “if I am part of the purchasing group.”
The two roles, Mr. Biden wrote, “should be as separate and distanced as possible to avoid the appearance of a clear conflict, which is not something to take lightly as an attorney.”
Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings mostly came as he spiraled from addiction and self-destructive behavior that exacerbated family and financial problems, amid his grief over the illness and death of his older brother, Beau.
This account of the Romania proposal is derived from hundreds of pages of business documents, letters, emails and text messages obtained via public records requests, provided to congressional and executive branch investigators or retrieved from a cache of files linked to Mr. Biden’s abandoned laptop, as well as interviews and testimony transcripts.
The land deal collapsed in 2017 before the Chinese invested any money in it amid a contentious struggle for control among Mr. Biden’s partners, during which he protested in a WhatsApp message: “I’m the only one putting an entire family legacy on the line.”
Mr. Biden’s efforts came partly as his father was pressing the Romanians to rid their country of nepotism and corruption.
There is no evidence that Mr. Biden’s father was involved in the business dealings, though he was introduced by his son to executives of the Chinese company, CEFC China Energy, in an apparent effort to impress them.
A spokeswoman for the former president declined to comment. Hunter Biden, James Biden, Mr. Popoviciu and their lawyers did not respond to requests for comment. A lawyer for the younger Mr. Biden previously told The Times that his client never discussed anything related to Romania with his father.
Nonetheless, U.S. government officials were alarmed about potential conflicts of interest between his father’s vice-presidential portfolio and Hunter Biden’s business.
The activity became a political liability when his father began a successful campaign for the presidency in April 2019.
By then, the international dealings of Hunter and James Biden had largely run their course.
CEFC had come under scrutiny from authorities in the United States and China and had pivoted to cultivating Mr. Trump’s circle. The Justice Department was looking into Hunter Biden’s foreign business.
The matter dogged the Bidens throughout the elder Mr. Biden’s presidency. Then, as he was preparing to leave office, the president in December 2024 pardoned his son for tax and gun convictions, as well as any crimes he may have committed starting around the time he began pursuing foreign business, including his widely criticized service on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. James Biden and other family members also received pre-emptive pardons, despite not having been charged with any crimes.
Crusade Against Corruption
The elder Mr. Biden prided himself on his record as a global statesman who assailed corruption as a threat to democracy and prodded allied countries to pursue investigations into oligarchs who got rich by siphoning state assets.
Mr. Popoviciu was a target of an anti-corruption initiative supported by Vice President Biden. The Romanian developer had been charged in connection with his purchase in 2000 of a majority stake of farmland in North Bucharest from a government agricultural university for what prosecutors claimed was a fraction of its value. They also accused him of trying to bribe an official at the anti-corruption agency investigating the matter.
Mr. Popoviciu had developed the land into a large shopping mall, residences and offices. The U.S. government signed a long-term lease to house the country’s embassy compound, which consists of multiple buildings on about 11 acres, in the development.
In 2014, with dissatisfaction mounting in Bucharest over corruption scandals and austerity measures, Vice President Biden traveled to the city. In a speech to government officials and civil activists, he denounced corruption as “a cancer” and warned of societal decline “when politicians can be bought, when courts can be manipulated.”
His exhortations carried weight, since prosecutors in Romania and other allied countries have received support and guidance from the U.S. government.
Hunter Biden, working for the firm Boies Schiller Flexner, signed on in 2015 as a lawyer to help Mr. Popoviciu fight the corruption case. The developer wanted Mr. Biden and his associates to persuade the Obama administration to pressure the Romanians to drop the case, U.S. prosecutors suggested later.
In November 2015, Mr. Biden traveled to Bucharest with another Boies Schiller lawyer to meet with the new U.S. ambassador to Romania, Hans Klemm, who had been sworn in two months earlier. Over a meal at the embassy compound with Mr. Klemm, Mr. Biden and his colleague discussed the Popoviciu case, according to two people familiar with the episode and documents.
Mr. Popoviciu’s lawyers later argued to Mr. Klemm that if the prosecution were to proceed aggressively, it could complicate the Romanian developer’s ownership of the land, threatening the embassy’s lease.
The involvement of the vice president’s son seemed inappropriate to Mr. Klemm, according to a person familiar with his thinking.
The ambassador did not go to bat for Mr. Popoviciu, and the prosecution continued.
Boies Schiller did not respond to a request for comment.
A Questionable Deal
The proposed land sale emerged as an alternate approach to thwarting the prosecution.
The thinking was that the Romanians might be more willing to consider settling their case against Mr. Popoviciu if he reduced his ownership share of the land and allowed the government to collect revenue from the arrangement after CEFC’s investment, which was to be $300 million to $500 million, according to a term sheet.
Documents detail varying structures of the deal, but all of the iterations indicate that CEFC would own a significant minority of as much as 47.5 percent of the resulting joint venture, which would include both developed property and undeveloped land.
A prospectus emailed to Hunter and James Biden and others by James Gilliar, a British businessman with whom they had teamed up, elaborated on how the deal could further sweeten the pot for the Romanians to “facilitate this resolution.” It envisioned allowing the Romanian government to retain a 10 percent stake in the project that would provide “steady annual income for long term for the state budget.”
Put another way: The Romanian government could reap financial benefit if the case was dropped and the deal went through.
The deal was among several projects in different parts of the world for which the joint venture discussed seeking CEFC investment. The prospectus casts Hunter Biden as “key in relationship set up” for proposed investments that would further CEFC’s efforts. At the time, the company’s expansion was part of the Chinese government’s Belt and Road economic influence initiative.
Documents show that Mr. Biden was involved in discussions about the structure of the joint venture, as well as the proposed purchase of the Bucharest land and the legal defense of Mr. Popoviciu. In messages, Mr. Biden, who called his client “Gabs,” described the developer as “a very good man that’s being very badly treated by a suspect Romanian justice system.”
The documents do not show Mr. Biden specifically discussing the inclusion of the embassy, nor do they stipulate that the embassy land — or any other specific parcels in the development — would be included in the deal. But they also do not mention any exemptions.
One of Mr. Biden’s partners, Tony Bobulinski, a retired Naval officer turned California businessman, expressed concern to Mr. Popoviciu about the prospect of the embassy being involved in the deal, and said it should be excluded, according to an associate of the developer.
Mr. Gilliar said in a statement to The Times that the plan “had no connection whatsoever to the U.S. Embassy,” but he did not dispute the documents upon which this account is based. He generally defended the project as modeled on similar investments elsewhere in Europe and said that, at the time, Chinese investment “was both welcomed and encouraged in the European Union and the United States.”
After the joint venture collapsed a Romanian court acquitted Mr. Popoviciu on procedural grounds.
Mr. Biden, in testimony to Republican-controlled congressional committees investigating his foreign dealings, said he severed his relationship with the venture because Mr. Bobulinski was “throwing around my family’s name” without consent.
Mr. Bobulinski, in his own testimony, said he was “knowingly and aggressively defrauded” by Hunter and James Biden, accusing them of cutting him out of their dealings with CEFC.
Through another partner’s company, Hunter Biden received a total of about $1 million from Mr. Popoviciu, primarily while his father was vice president, according to prosecutors and records released by congressional Republicans.
The younger Mr. Biden also received millions more from entities and individuals affiliated with CEFC.
The Chinese payments were at least partly to help identify other infrastructure investment opportunities. But before any projects were developed, CEFC crumbled as the company and its executives came under investigation in China and the United States.
The company’s chairman, whom Hunter Biden had introduced to his father after he left the vice presidency in 2017, was taken into custody by Chinese authorities in 2018 and has not been heard from since.
Kenneth P. Vogel is based in Washington and investigates the intersection of money, politics and influence.
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