Hunter Biden reportedly sought assistance from the U.S. government for a lucrative energy project in Italy when President Biden was serving as vice president, highlighting allegations that he used his father’s political standing as leverage for his foreign business interests. 

The younger Biden wrote at least one letter to the U.S. ambassador to Italy in 2016 seeking assistance for the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, where he was a board member, according to newly released records and interviews cited by the New York Times.

The response was lukewarm, as officials were somewhat hesitant to help with a request from the son of a sitting vice president on behalf of a foreign company. 

‘This is a Ukrainian company and, purely to protect ourselves, U.S.G. should not be actively advocating with the government of Italy without the company going through the D.O.C. Advocacy Center,’ an official wrote. 

The acronyms refer to the United States government and a Department of Commerce program that supports American companies that seek business with foreign governments.

‘I want to be careful about promising too much,’ wrote a Commerce Department official based in the U.S. Embassy in Rome who responded. 

Hunter Biden asked several people if they could arrange an introduction between Burisma and the president of the Tuscany region of Italy, where Burisma was pursuing a geothermal project, Abbe Lowell, Biden’s lawyer, said. 

He said no meeting had occurred.  

‘No meeting occurred, no project materialized, no request for anything in the U.S. was ever sought and only an introduction in Italy was requested,’ 

In a statement to the Times, Lowell said the outreach by Biden was a ‘proper request.’

President Biden wasn’t aware that his son reached out to the U.S. Embassy in Italy on behalf of Burisma when he was vice president, the White House said. 

Hunter Biden has not been charged with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, which requires people to disclose when they lobby the U.S. government on behalf of foreign interests.

Fox News Digital has reached out to the State Department and the White House. 

The State Department announced that it had approved $20 billion in arms sales to Israel as the region continues to spiral towards a wider war in the Middle East.

The advance includes a myriad of weapons such as fighter jets and equipment worth nearly $19 billion, tank cartridges valued at $774 million, explosive mortar cartridges valued at over $60 million and army vehicles worth $583 million, the Pentagon said in a statement.

‘The United States is committed to the security of Israel, and it is vital to U.S. national interests to assist Israel to develop and maintain a strong and ready self-defense capability. This proposed sale is consistent with those objectives,’ the State Department said.

In a statement, Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant thanked the U.S. for allowing Israel to maintain a ‘qualitative military edge in the region.’

‘Thank you to Secretary of Defense Austin and Secretary of State Blinken for advancing critical force buildup initiatives that assist Israel in developing and maintaining its qualitative military edge in the region,’ he posted on X. ‘This includes incorporating F-15IAs into the IAF fleet of fighter aircraft, and providing critical munition to ensure Israel’s capabilities and security.’

‘As we fight to defend Israel on 7 different fronts, your message of support and commitment to Israel’s security are clear,’ he said.

The impending sale comes as regional tension hurtles towards a breaking point. 

Regional sources told Fox News chief foreign correspondent Trey Yingst on Monday that they are concerned Iran and its proxies could attack Israel within the next 24 hours in retaliation for the killing of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran late last month.

On Monday, the Lebanon-based terrorist group Hezbollah launched 30 rockets into northern Israel, although no casualties were reported, according to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). 

‘Following sirens that sounded a short while ago in northern Israel, approximately 30 projectiles were identified crossing from Lebanon toward the area of Kabri, a number of which fell in open areas,’ an IDF spokesman said. 

The $20 billion in arms sales are not expected to be delivered to Israel soon, with the sales expected to secure the nation’s resources long-term.

Fox News Digital’s Greg Norman and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

President Biden repeated a claim he had been fact-checked for in the past, telling an audience on Tuesday that he traveled 17,000 miles with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

‘I spent a lot of time with Xi Jinping,’ he said during his remarks at an event touting the Biden ‘Cancer Moonshot’ initiative in New Orleans, Louisiana.

‘I spent over 80 hours with him alone. Over 17,000 miles in China, anywhere in Tibet, near Tibet.’ 

He described telling the Chinese president that ‘possibility’ is the one word that can define America, tying his analogy to the Cancer Moonshot initiative. 

Biden’s claim that he has traveled more than 17,000 miles with Xi has previously been fact-checked and considered primarily inaccurate, however. 

He has made the claim many times over several years and was fact-checked by the Washington Post in 2021. ‘Try as we could, however, we still could not get the travel to add up to 17,000 miles,’ wrote the publication. 

Biden was given three pinocchios for his claim. 

According to the Post, this number of pinocchios means there is ‘significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions.’ It is comparable to a rating of ‘mostly false.’

The White House did not immediately respond to inquiries from Fox News Digital. 

Biden announced $150 million in ARPA-H awards to develop technologies that will allow surgeons to provide more successful tumor-removal surgeries for people facing cancer at the event in New Orleans.

After having dropped out of the 2024 presidential race last month and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris to succeed him, Biden is now reportedly focusing on the causes that are most personal for him in his remaining months as president. 

Cancer research is of ‘immense importance’ to the president, an aide told CNN.

Vice President Harris appears to be singing a different tune when it comes to ensuring ‘Medicare-for-all,’ compared to when she ran for president in 2019.

A campaign official told Fox News senior White House correspondent Peter Doocy that Harris will not push the subject of single-payer or ‘Medicare-for-all’ this go around, as she seeks her first term as commander-in-chief.

In 2019, Fox News spoke to Harris in the hallways of Capitol Hill, asking about her plans for providing health care.

‘How important is it to your health care plan to get rid of private insurance companies? Because there is some confusion about that,’ Doocy asked Harris on Jan. 30, 2019.

‘I’m glad you asked. Yeah. So, the bottom line and the most important is that everyone have access to health care,’ Harris said. ‘That is the goal. That is the purpose for me supporting the policy of ‘Medicare-for-all.’

‘If Congress votes in a way that reflects the values and desires of the American people, then Congress will vote for a policy that gives everyone access to health care,’ she later said.

On July 29, 2019, Harris published a piece on her campaign website about her plan to provide ‘Medicare-for-all.’

She wrote, ‘There is perhaps no more complicated or more personal issue for Americans than health care.’ Harris also wrote that the American health care system is ‘a patchwork of plans, providers and costs’ that frustrates people and leaves them powerless against the insurance companies in charge.

Her proposed solution was to provide ‘Medicare-for-all’ because ‘Medicare works’ and ‘it’s popular.’

”Medicare-for-all’ will cover all medically necessary services, including emergency room visits, doctor visits, vision, dental, hearing aids, mental health, and substance-use disorder treatment, and comprehensive reproductive health care services,’ Harris wrote. ‘It will also allow the Secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate for lower prescription drug prices.’

But her plan in July was different from what she proposed in January that year, because it would allow private insurers to offer Medicare plans to their clients.

In an interview with The Hill in October 2019, Harris said she knew she would be called ‘a flip-flopper’ after she backed away from her initial support of ‘Medicare-for-all,’ and developed her own health care plan.

Her plan in January 2019 called on eliminating private insurance. Then in July 2019, she chose to include a role for private insurance companies to privately administer Medicare plans, though under strict rules.

Even in 2017, Harris backed a single-payer plan proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

Harris told constituents at a town hall in Oakland on Aug. 30, 2017, that she planned to co-sponsor Sanders’ forthcoming ‘Medicare-for-all’ bill, explaining that it was ‘just the right thing to do.’

‘It’s not just about what is morally and ethically right. It also makes sense from a fiscal standpoint,’ Harris said at the time.

Harris had previously stated that she supported the single-payer system as a ‘concept,’ but that lawmakers needed to ‘work out the details.’ Her announcement to co-sponsor Sanders’ bill was the first time she had publicly supported a single-payer plan.

Under this European-style health care system, the government is solely responsible for covering health care costs. Sanders rolled out an earlier version of his proposal during the Democratic presidential primaries in 2016.

The plan was first estimated to cost $13.8 trillion over the first 10 years, but that ballooned to $32 trillion and required an average annual tax increase of $24,000 per household.

Fox News’ Brooke Singman contributed to this report.

As Israel continues to brace itself under the threat of an imminent attack from Iran or its proxy forces, including Hamas and Hezbollah, security experts are sounding the alarm that Tehran has its sites set on Jordan as its next great ‘terror front.’

‘Jordan is the last holdout,’ Behnam Ben Taleblu, Iran expert and senior fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) told Fox News Digital. ‘It’s the last bastion of the pro-Western or status quo order in the heartland of the northern part of the Middle East.’

The security expert pointed to Iran’s growing influence and support for proxy fighters not only in Gaza, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, but further out across the Arabian Peninsula, including Yemen and Oman, where anti-Israel sentiment is on the rise. 

‘Increasingly, the regime has benefited from the rise in anti-Israel sentiment to cause instability in Jordan,’ Ben Taleblu said.

Growing concern over how Tehran will use anti-Israeli sentiment in the Middle East coincided with a warning issued Monday by Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz, who said Iran was working ‘to establish a new eastern terror front against Israel’s major population centers.’

The Israeli official said the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is coordinating with ‘Hamas operatives in Lebanon to smuggle weapons and funds into Jordan’ with the apparent aim of destabilizing the Israeli neighbor. 

Katz said smuggled arms are transported across Jordan’s western border into the West Bank, known as Judea and Samaria, with a particular focus on refugee camps and the goal of establishing pro-Iranian sentiment as it has done in areas like Gaza and southern Lebanon. 

‘The Iranian axis of evil today effectively controls refugee camps in Judea and Samaria through its proxies, leaving the Palestinian Authority powerless to act,’ Katz added. 

Jordan’s border with Israel is the Jewish state’s longest shared border, reportedly stretching some 300 miles from the contested Golan Heights in the north, through the Palestinian West Bank and the Dead Sea, before ending at the Gulf of Aqaba.

Though Katz’s warnings come as tensions between Israel and Iran have reached a historic peak, local reporting shows that Iranian-led smuggling efforts have plagued Jordanian security efforts for years.

The Jordanian regime over the last half decade has increasingly been working to stop smuggling operations to help prevent the formation of anti-Israel terrorist cells in the West Bank. 

‘Ultimately [that would] be a benefit to the Islamic Republic, because it could allow for a full encirclement of Israel,’ Ben Taleblu said.  ‘The one thing that stands in the way of all of this is the Jordanian monarchy and the strength of the Jordanian security services.’

Jordanian officials have been working to ease tensions in the region by meeting with U.S., Israeli and Iranian officials over recent weeks following Tehran’s threat to hit the Jewish state directly.

Though even as Jordan works to maintain the status quo in the region and prevent an all-out war, it has also warned it will not become a battleground state for either nation to utilize. 

‘We will not be a battlefield for Iran or Israel. We informed the Iranians and the Israelis that we will not allow anyone to violate our airspace and risk the safety of our citizens,’ Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said in a Saturday interview, according to a Reuters report. 

‘We will intercept anything that passes through our airspace or think that it constitutes a threat to us or our citizens,’ he added.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has reportedly postponed a trip to the Middle East over heightened security concerns in the region and a possible retaliatory strike from Iran against Israel. 

Blinken’s trip, originally scheduled for Tuesday, was delayed over ‘uncertainty about the situation,’ Axios reported, citing two unnamed sources. 

The delayed trip comes ahead of planned cease-fire talks later this week after more than 10 months of fighting between Israel and Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip. 

Hamas fired two rockets aimed at Tel Aviv on Tuesday while Israel launched separate deadly airstrikes in Gaza. 

Despite the ongoing violence, U.S. officials said Monday they expected the talks to resume Thursday as planned. 

The leaders of Britain, France and Germany on Monday urged Iran and its allies to refrain from retaliatory attacks against Israel in response to the assassination of a top Hamas commander in Tehran last month. 

Israel was immediately blamed for the assassination after pledging to kill Ismail Haniyeh and other Hamas leaders over the terrorist group’s Oct. 7 attack on the Jewish state, which killed 1,200 people and saw hundreds more taken hostage. 

The Palestinian death toll is nearing 40,000 people, per figures from Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry. 

European leaders have also backed a push by mediators from the U.S., Qatar and Egypt to broker an agreement to end the Israel-Hamas war. 

Mediators have spent months trying to get both sides to agree to a three-phase plan in which Hamas would release the remaining hostages captured in its Oct. 7 attack in exchange for Palestinians imprisoned in Israel, and Israel would withdraw from Gaza. 

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Critics have claimed President Biden’s seemingly light schedule and infrequent public appearances since dropping out of the presidential race will harm America’s image abroad, even as the White House stresses recent policy wins. 

‘Biden has disappeared from view, Harris is campaigning full-time, and won’t meet with the press,’ former national security adviser K.T. McFarland told Fox News Digital. 

‘This sends a signal to the world that there is no one in charge in the White House,’ McFarland explained. ‘Our allies wonder whether they can trust us.  Our adversaries see this as a wide open window of opportunity, when they can exploit us without risk of consequences.’

‘They know this window of opportunity will slam shut if Donald Trump is elected,’ McFarland argued. ‘We’re in a period of maximum vulnerability.’

Biden has made few public appearances and his schedule appears lighter than it had been prior to his decision not to seek a second term. 

When Fox News correspondent David Spunt last week asked White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre why the American people have not heard from the president, she replied that the White House had put out two readouts that day. 

Jean-Pierre also stressed that the administration is now in a ‘different time’ and that Americans would ‘get to see the president… it is certainly the president’s priority, to make sure that we do everything that we can, to protect our national security, right?’ 

The press secretary highlighted the push for a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas as well as the administration’s response to Tropical Storm Debby as important issues that have taken Biden’s attention in recent weeks. 

But concerns about mounting tensions in the Middle East grew more severe this week as Israel revealed intelligence that indicated Iran would launch a significant attack, which would serve as retaliation for the death of Hamas commander Ismail Haniyeh. 

Top U.S. national security leaders said last week that they and allies are directly pressing Israel, Iran and others to avoid escalating the conflict, even as the U.S. moved more troops to the region and threatened retaliation if American forces are attacked.

The White House continued to stress Biden’s focus on a range of issues as proof that he’s not hiding from the public: Biden and the first lady will visit New Orleans this week to highlight the Biden Cancer Moonshot initiative to reduce the cancer death rate by at least half before 2047, NOLA reported. 

‘President Biden is working hard and building on the most successful record of any modern administration by delivering more results for the American people,’ White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates told Fox News Digital. 

Bates cited ‘an historic return of unjustly detained Americans from Russia, perpetuating the Biden-Harris manufacturing boom, lowering the costs of prescription drugs, and bringing unlawful border crossings to the lowest level in years’ as major recent wins for the administration. 

Bates also leveled criticism at the Republicans for ‘blocking tough, bipartisan border legislation on behalf of Donald Trump.’

Politico reported that Biden will use his final half-year in office to focus on ‘legacy items’ and give Vice President Kamala Harris the lion’s share of the limelight as she seeks to become the first female president of the United States: The White House, for example, will unveil Medicare price negotiation savings this week, which the Biden campaign – and now the Harris campaign – had aimed to focus on as part of the push for votes in November. 

But the White House is still in the early days of a tumultuous economic situation. The president claimed to have ‘cured the economy’ last week just before the stock market stumbled and raised concerns about the economic health of the country throughout the rest of the year. 

‘The July jobs report is being viewed as a recession warning, and the markets are responding accordingly,’ Bill Adams, chief economist at the Dallas-based Comerica Bank, said after the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped over 1,000 points, marking a 2.6% shift and the worst day since September 2022. 

Fox News Digital’s Danielle Wallace and Fox News Correspondent David Spunt contributed to this report.

Elon Musk’s conversational interview with former President Trump on Monday evening pulled in a combined 1 billion views, according to the tech billionaire. 

‘Combined views of the conversation with @realDonaldTrump and subsequent discussion by other accounts now ~1 billion,’ Musk posted on his social media platform X early Tuesday morning following the interview. 

The message followed a previous post outlining that, ‘Between 7:47 PM and 10:47 PM ET, President Donald Trump’s Space post received 73 million views. During the same period, there were 4 million posts about Elon Musk and President Trump’s conversation on 𝕏, generating a total of 998 million views.’

Trump spoke with Musk on Monday evening on Twitter Space for two hours in an expansive audio-only interview that included the 45th president speaking at length about immigration woes, spiraling inflation issues, the assassination attempt against his life and policies he would implement if he wins at the polls on Nov. 5. 

​​’I believe it’s over 20 million people came into our country. Many coming from jails, from prisons, from mental institutions, or a bigger version of that is insane asylums. And many are terrorists. And I’ll tell you what, they’re coming not just from South America. They’re coming from Africa. They’re coming from all over the world. They’re coming from Asia. They’re coming from the Middle East,’ Trump told Musk, who endorsed Trump earlier this year. 

Trump said that despite Vice President Kamala Harris’ recent rhetoric to address the spiraling migrant crisis at the border if elected, she and President Biden have had years to address migration but ‘won’t do anything.’ 

​​’She had three and a half years, and by the way, they have another five months that they can do something. But they won’t do anything. It’s all talk. She’s incompetent and he’s incompetent. And frankly, I think that she’s more incompetent than he is, and that’s saying something, because he’s not too good,’ he said. 

Trump’s interview with Musk kicked off after 8:30 p.m. Monday, following a ‘massive’ distributed denial-of-service attack on the platform that caused delays, Musk explained on X. Despite the disruption, the interview received a billion viewers, according to Musk’s tally.

Trump also addressed Biden’s exit from the 2024 race during the conversation, saying it was a Democratic ‘coup’ that pressured Biden to drop out. Biden dropped out of the running last month as concerns mounted surrounding his mental acuity and 81 years of age and Democrats and traditional allies of the party called on him to exit the race. 

‘This was a coup. This was a coup of a president of the United States. He didn’t want to leave, and they said, ‘We can do it the nice way, or we can do it the hard way,” Trump said. 

‘They just took him out back behind the shed and basically shot him,’ Musk added before Trump slammed Biden as ‘the worst president in history.’ 

The 45th president also took a shot at Harris for snubbing the media and interviews since she emerged as the Democratic Party’s 2024 nominee. Harris has avoided formal press conferences or sit-down interviews, including for a Time magazine cover story, for 23 days, as of Tuesday.  

‘It’s pretty sad when you think that somebody that does this for a living can’t answer a question or is afraid to do an interview, and in her case, with a very friendly interview. She’s got all friendly interviewers,’ Trump said.

Musk said after the interview that he is ‘happy to host Kamala’ in the same interview format. 

Trump made a return to X earlier on Monday after nearly a year of not posting on his once-favored social media platform. Before Musk bought Twitter, now X, in 2022, Trump was suspended from his Twitter account following the breach of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He seldom posted on the platform after Musk reinstated his account, only sharing his mugshot in August of last year. 

Ahead of his interview with Trump, Musk hyped the interview as one that ‘should be highly entertaining!’ as it ‘​​is unscripted with no limits on subject matter.’