Hunter Biden sent and received emails with a former top aide to President Biden. Federal investigators reportedly questioned this person in the investigation into how the president handled classified documents.
Kathy Chung, who was Joe Biden‘s executive assistant when he was vice president and is now the Pentagon’s deputy director of protocol, is one of several former members of the president’s staff who will be questioned by law enforcement. At the end of the Obama administration, in early 2017, Chung and the other questioned people helped move things out of Biden’s office.
During most of her five years working for Biden during the Obama administration, Chung regularly talked to Biden’s son Hunter Biden, telling him about his father’s schedule and passing on messages from the then-vice president, according to emails found on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop.
Hunter Biden and Chung had known each other before she worked for his father. When Michele Smith left the White House in the spring of 2012, the emails showed that Hunter Biden suggested Chung for the executive assistant job.
At the time, Chung was the scheduling director in the office of the former Democratic senator from Colorado, Mark Udall. She used to work for Delaware Sen. Ted Kaufman, who replaced Biden in the Senate in 2009 and has been a close friend of Biden’s for decades.
Dozens of more emails between Chung and Biden’s son showed that the two talked in different ways.
In October 2015, Hunter Biden and Chung discussed setting up a meeting with Carlos Slim, a Mexican billionaire. Hunter set up a video conference with his father and Slim, with whom he wanted to do business at the time.
In another case from earlier that year, Chung invited Hunter and other members of the Biden family to a luncheon at the State Department that his father was hosting in honor of Chinese President Xi Jinping. Chung’s father hosted the luncheon.
Hunter Biden and Chung even talked about birthday presents for family members and helping friends’ children get into college.
After Biden left the White House in February 2017, his son Hunter Biden suggested that Chung, who seems to have kept working for the former vice president after Obama left office, join him and his business partners Eric Schwerin and Joan Mayer.
And on more than one occasion, they worked together to set up meetings with Amy Gutmann, who used to be president of the University of Pennsylvania. Gutmann was chosen to be the U.S. ambassador to Germany soon after the president took office.
On the other hand, Gutmann went to the 2018 grand opening of the president’s think tank in Washington, D.C., the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.
On Monday, the White House said that at the Penn Biden Center, a number of secret documents from Biden’s time as vice president had been found. Some of the papers were marked as being the most secret.
Then, on Thursday, the White House said that a second set of classified documents were found in the garage of Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware.
The New York Times said that Biden’s staff have been looking for other places where he might have brought more classified documents from his time as vice president in the Obama administration.
Thursday, Karine Jean-Pierre, the press secretary at the White House, said that the search for documents is over.
