The following is an excerpt from Blaze Media’s Capitol Hill Brief email newsletter:

On Friday, former vice president and current Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said that he was “angered” that Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Lindsey Graham would dare look into his and his son’s dealings in the Ukraine, telling CNN that "Lindsey is about to go down in a way that I think he's going to regret his whole life.” President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani accused Biden of threatening Graham and compared the former vice president to the mafia.

But is he really going to regret it? Let’s look at the facts. Graham, who asked the State Department for Biden-related records the day before, is the third Senate committee chairman to start looking into the issue, behind Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson.

Given the questions that people already had about Hunter Biden’s employment on the board of Burisma and the several things that we’ve since learned about Biden’s employment, the company’s receipt of federal bailout funds, and what went on at the Obama administration’s State Department while Biden was on the Burisma board, it’s safe to say that the only regrettable action for Graham and his colleagues would be to ignore the growing pile of suspicious information.

Republican Senators Chuck Grassley, Iowa, and Ron Johnson, Wisc., want some answers on how much, if any, influence Hunter Biden's job at a Ukrainian energy company had on decisions made by the State Department under President Barack Obama.

In a letter dated Wednesday, the two senators asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for a wide range of records to "better understand what actions, if any, the Obama administration took to ensure that policy decisions relating to Ukraine and Burisma were not improperly influenced by the employment and financial interests of family members."

"In April 2014, Vice President Biden reportedly became the 'public face of the administration's handling of Ukraine,'" the lawmakers write. "Around the same time, the Vice President's son, Hunter Biden, and his business associate, Devon Archer, both began serving on the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company."

Hunter Biden's former employment at Burisma is at the center of the current impeachment debate raging in Washington, D.C. At a 2018 Council on Foreign Relations event, Biden said that he — while still vice president — pressured then-Ukranain President Petro Poroshenko to fire then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin while Shokin was leading an investigation into the company by threatening to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees. House Democrats' impeachment probe has examined whether or not president Trump pressured Ukrainian authorities to look into the Burisma investigation with military aid.

In their Wednesday letter, Grassley and Johnson refer to a recent story from reporter John Solomon saying that, during the 2016 election cycle, a U.S. representative for Burisma — Karen Tramontano — tried to set up a meeting with Undersecretary of State Catherine A. Novelli to discuss ending the corruption allegations against the company.

"Although it is not clear if Under Secretary Novelli met with Karen Tramontano on March 1, 2016, as planned, later that month Tramontano and other members of Burisma's legal team reportedly met with Ukrainian prosecutors," the letter notes, referring to another report from Solomon from September. "According to what appears to be contemporaneous notes by one of those Ukrainian prosecutors, during that meeting, Burisma's legal team apologized about what they alleged to be 'false information' promoted by the U.S. Government about the prosecutors' handling of the investigation of Burisma."

The two also note other documents that "show other meetings that Burisma board members Hunter Biden and Devon Archer scheduled with high-ranking State Department officials" in 2015. The letter also points out that "just one day after Tramontano was scheduled to meet with Under Secretary Novelli about Burisma, Devon Archer was scheduled to meet with Secretary of State John Kerry."

The lawmakers then ask the department to provide "all State Department records relating to Hunter Biden, Devon Archer, [their business partner] Christopher Heinz, and Karen Tramontano" as well as "all State Department records relating to Burisma Holdings" and those related to some of Biden's other business ventures. They also ask whether or not the State Department has asked the Office of the Legal Adviser or the Office of the Inspector General  to "review potential concerns and conflicts of interest related to Hunter Biden's work for Burisma while Vice President Biden reportedly acted as the United States' top official in Ukraine? If not, why not?"

Johnson is the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and Grassley chairs the Senate Finance Committee. The senators asked that the department provide the information in two weeks, giving a deadline of November 20.

A new report brings up new questions about Hunter Biden's foreign business dealings while his father, Joe Biden, was vice president, LevinTV host Mark Levin noted on the radio Thursday night, but who's paying attention?

Levin read from an NBC report published earlier that day that outlined the details of the younger Biden's legal work in Romania for a wealthy real estate tycoon accused of making a corrupt land deal while his father was still in office.

“We don’t know what [Hunter Biden] was paid or what he was paid for," Washington University law professor Kathleen Clark said in the story, "but it does raise questions of whether this Romanian individual facing criminal charges was actually paying for a connection to the American vice president.”

"Hunter Biden was very busy in Ukraine, in China, in Romania," Levin noted.

And yet, despite all of of these suspect-looking business dealings during his father's time in office, Hunter Biden still hasn't been asked to testify before Congress, and there's unlikely to be much interest in the matter from the rest of the media.

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A Chinese tech company recently blacklisted by the United States government over human rights concerns has business ties to Hunter Biden, son of Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden.

On Monday, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced that 28 Chinese entities would be added to the list of firms that U.S. companies are barred from doing business with, as they "have been implicated in human rights violations and abuses in China’s campaign targeting Uighurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities."

“The U.S. Government and Department of Commerce cannot and will not tolerate the brutal suppression of ethnic minorities within China,” said Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross.

One of the added entities is Megvii Technology, a company in which Hunter Biden owns a stake through his investment fund, Bohai Harvest RST (BHR). According to Fox Business, Biden has a 10 percent stake in the investment company.

A story in the Intercept from earlier this year explains the Biden-Mevii relationship in greater detail. In 2017, the report explains, BHR invested in one of Megvii's divisions, Face++, which makes facial recognition software.

Human Rights Watch initially issued a report in May that said Face++ code was found in an app used by Chinese police to track people in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. The organization later said that the code was "inoperable." In April, the New York Times listed Megvii as one of multiple tech companies behind software used in China's technological crackdown on Uighurs, but the company at the time said that it was focused on “commercial not political solutions."

Megvii also says that the U.S. government's blacklist decision was a wrong.

"Megvii strongly objects to the company’s designation on the U.S. Commerce Department’s Entity List, for which there are no grounds," reads a company statement. "We are committed to making sure our technology has a positive impact on society and we are in compliance with all laws and regulations in jurisdictions where we operate."

Megvii is a private company that is currently trying to go public, though Goldman Sachs said it is re-evaluating its involvement in the initial public offering (IPO) in light of the blacklisting. A September story at Wired points out that the IPO filing admits that police make use of its technology, but not in the context of Uighur surveillance. Instead, "It presents case studies that make its surveillance offerings sound more cuddly."

Hunter Biden's role at BHR and the fact that the announcement of the fund coincided with his 2013 trip to China aboard Air Force Two as part of a U.S. delegation are at the heart of President Donald Trump's efforts to have both Bidens' dealings in the country looked at by the Chinese government.

Trump suggested last week that "China should start an investigation in to the Bidens, because what happened in China was just about as bad as what happened with Ukraine." A Chinese official responded this week that the country has "no intention of intervening in the domestic affairs of the United States.”