The CIA has released an email message from the Obama administration purportedly showing that President Biden, while he was vice president, wanted to keep under wraps an intelligence report about Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine.

The intelligence report specifically stated that members of the Ukrainian government in 2015 believed the elder Mr. Biden was afraid of press scrutiny of “the alleged ties of the U.S. Vice President’s family to corruption in Ukraine.”

The email message, released on Tuesday by the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, is heavily redacted, though it came from an Obama administration official in touch with Mr. Biden’s office at the time he was vice president. 

“Just spoke with VP/NSA … and he would strongly prefer the report not/not be disseminated,” an administration official identified only as a “PDB Briefer” said in the email. The “PDB” refers to the presidential daily brief, an intelligence report that the president and the vice president usually receive every day. 

The message expressing Mr. Biden’s desire that the intelligence assessment be withheld from further dissemination was sent to someone in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. 

The intelligence report to which the “PDB Briefer” was referring was created in December 2015, the same month that Mr. Biden visited Ukraine to address the country’s parliament. 

According to the report — which, like the email message about the report itself, is heavily redacted — Ukrainian officials were dismayed that Mr. Biden only came to their country for a generic speech. 

“As of mid-December 2015 … officials within the administration of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko expressed bewilderment and disappointment at the 7–8 December 2015 visit of the Vice President of the United States to Kiev, Ukraine,” the intelligence report says. 

“After the visit, these officials assessed that the Vice President of the United States had come to Kiev almost exclusively to give a generic public speech, and had no intention of discussing substantive matters with Poroshenko or other officials within the Ukrainian government,” it continues. 

The report states that once Mr. Biden departed Ukraine, government officials “privately mused” that the then-vice president would not meet with Mr. Poroshenko because he did not want to suffer “U.S. media scrutiny of the alleged ties of the U.S. Vice President’s family to corrupt business practices in Ukraine.”

“These officials viewed the alleged ties of the U.S. Vice President’s family to corruption in Ukraine as evidence of a double-standard within the United States Government towards matters of corruption and political power,” the report assesses. 

At the time the report was written, the younger Mr. Biden had been working for the Ukrainian energy company Burisma for more than 18 months. As a member of the board, he was being paid around $50,000 per month until he departed the firm in 2019. 

The former president’s personal office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.