The FBI has not released any documents confirming illicit behavior on the part of Hunter Biden.
The argument
"The report, though, provides no evidence that Hunter Biden’s position affected U.S. policy. Biden campaign spokesperson Andrew Bates called the report “an attack founded on a long-disproven, hardcore rightwing conspiracy theory" that Johnson "has now explicitly stated he is attempting to exploit to bail out Donald Trump's re-election campaign." The release of the long-running probe comes less than a week before the first presidential debate between President Donald Trump and Biden, next Tuesday, Sept. 29.... Hunter was a member of the Burisma board part of the time that Biden served as the administration's point person on Ukraine, but he was not associated with Burisma during the prosecutor's probe. Democrats say the investigation is purely political and Johnson has admitted as much on several recent occasions. On Aug. 13, Johnson said the probe will “certainly help Donald Trump win re-election and certainly be pretty good, I would say, evidence about not voting for Vice President Biden.” And the next day, Johnson said, “We’ve got to speed it up because we got an election coming, and people have a right to know before they cast their ballot.” Last week, NBC News reported that Amos Hochstein, the only person known to have directly discussed Burisma with Joe Biden in 2015, was prepared to testify that he never changed U.S. policy because of Burisma and was never asked to do so and that Burisma never factored into any policy decisions around energy or Biden's advocacy for a new Ukrainian prosecutor general — and that he has told colleagues that the Obama administration sought to punish Burisma rather than protect it."
Premises
Counter-arguments
Critics respond that a candidate's family business dealings bear on judgment and the appearance of a conflict of interest regardless of any criminal finding. 'No evidence that policy changed' is not the same as no impropriety, and voters may legitimately weigh the optics of a sitting vice-president's son taking a lucrative board seat in a country his father was overseeing. That an investigation is politically timed does not make the underlying questions about the arrangement false or illegitimate — it makes them contested.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] Absence of proof that U.S. policy changed does not dispel the appearance of a conflict of interest, which voters may reasonably weigh in judging a candidate. [Rejecting P2] A probe being politically motivated or timed does not make the underlying factual questions about the board seat illegitimate or untrue. [Rejecting P3] A witness's account that Burisma never factored into policy speaks to influence, not to the separate question of whether the arrangement itself was proper. [Rejecting C] Whether a relative's conduct should bear on a campaign is a judgment about character and appearances, not only about proven crimes.