President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son Hunter Biden said on Wednesday that he was being investigated by federal prosecutors over his taxes.
“I learned yesterday for the first time that the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Delaware advised my legal counsel, also yesterday, that they are investigating my tax affairs,” Hunter Biden said in a statement released by the Biden transition team.
The statement continued: “I take this matter very seriously but I am confident that a professional and objective review of these matters will demonstrate that I handled my affairs legally and appropriately, including with the benefit of professional tax advisers.”
In the news release with the younger Mr. Biden’s statement, the Biden transition said: “President-elect Biden is deeply proud of his son, who has fought through difficult challenges, including the vicious personal attacks of recent months, only to emerge stronger.”
Hunter Biden pursued a range of business ventures around the world during his father’s time as vice president and beyond.
He was paid $50,000 a month or more to serve on the board of a Ukrainian energy company owned by an oligarch who was widely seen as corrupt, advised a wealthy Romanian business executive facing corruption charges and invested in an equity fund linked to the Chinese government.
But, by early 2017, Mr. Biden and his first wife, who were then estranged, owed $313,970 in taxes, according to filing she submitted in their divorce case.
The next year, the I.R.S. issued a lien against Mr. Biden and his then ex-wife for $112,805 in unpaid taxes from 2015. Those taxes appeared to have been paid off by March, when the lien was released.
During the presidential campaign, Mr. Biden’s business dealings were the focus of repeated attacks by President Trump and his allies, who pressed claims of corruption in an effort to tarnish the elder Mr. Biden’s candidacy.
The focus on Mr. Biden intensified in the final weeks of the campaign after some of Mr. Trump’s associates provided material that purportedly came from Mr. Biden’s hard drive to The New York Post.
The Post reported that the F.B.I. had seized a computer from which the materials were accessed.
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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