Hunter Biden dodged questions about his efforts to strike a business deal with a Chinese Communist Party-linked company, saying in a new interview that he could not recall emails about payment proposals with references to his family. He also falsely cast a U.S. intelligence community report as determining such stories, which emerged at the end of the 2020 campaign, as a “Russian operation from the get-go.”

In his memoir, Beautiful Things, the president’s 51-year-old son devoted a chapter to defending his work for Ukrainian gas giant Burisma Holdings, but he largely avoided the controversy surrounding his attempted deal-making in China. Concerns about Biden gained broader attention in late 2020 after multiple outlets reported that he was being federally investigated in connection with his taxes in potential relation to his overseas business with China.