Hunter Biden recently defended his decision to join the board of Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings while his father was serving as vice president of the United States, saying his background, including his “expertise” in corporate governance, made him fit for the role.
The younger Biden’s comments came during an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live that aired Thursday. Kimmel read an excerpt from Hunter Biden’s new memoir Beautiful Things in which he writes, “Did I make a mistake by taking a seat on the board of a Ukrainian gas company? No. Did I display a lack of judgment? No. Would I do it again? No.”
Hunter Biden told Kimmel that he meant what he wrote.
“I went to Yale Law School, I served on at least a dozen boards before Burisma,” he said, adding that he had served as chairman of the board of Amtrak and chairman of the board of World Food Program USA.
“I had expertise in corporate governance,” he continued. “I was asked to serve on the board for corporate governance and I was a lawyer at Boies, Schiller and Flexner, which is how I was first approached.”
“However, what I didn’t take into account was the way they would use the perception against my dad and for that, I wouldn’t do it again for that reason,” he said.
In September, Senate Republicans concluded their investigation into Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, finding that the Obama administration had ignored “glaring warning signs” when the younger Biden joined the board of Burisma.
The board position “created an immediate potential conflict of interest” because his father, who was vice president at the time, was involved in U.S. policy toward Ukraine, the report said.
However, both President Biden and his son have denied any wrongdoing.
Hunter Biden also repeated his claims that he does not know if a laptop left at a Delaware computer-repair shop in 2019 filled with compromising information is his.
“I really don’t know,” he told Kimmel. “The fact of the matter is it’s a red herring. It is absolutely a red herring but I’m absolutely, I think, within my rights to question anything that comes from the desk of Rudy Giuliani and so I don’t know is the answer.”
The comment comes months after the New York Post first reported on the emails, which suggest Hunter Biden may have made an introduction between his father, then–vice president Joe Biden, and a Ukrainian adviser to Burisma Holdings in 2015.
The emails purportedly show that Hunter Biden made the introduction less than a year before his father pushed Ukrainian officials to fire a prosecutor who was investigating the company.
The documents, which Rudy Giuliani, then on the legal team of President Trump, gave to the paper, were reportedly recovered from a laptop computer that was dropped off at a repair shop in Delaware in April 2019 but never retrieved. It was seized by the FBI months later.
A senior federal law enforcement official told Fox News in October that the emails are “authentic,” while officials at the FBI and the Justice Department agreed with then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe’s comments that the laptop is “not part of a Russian disinformation campaign.”
According to the New York Post, other emails on the laptop featured Hunter Biden exploring potential business deals with China’s largest private energy company. He called one such deal “interesting for me and my family.”
The laptop also reportedly held personal photos and recordings, including a video that purportedly shows Hunter Biden using drugs and engaging in sexual activity.