President Joe Biden, citing his paternal love, has quite literally stood beside his scandal-plagued son Hunter Biden amid a tumultuous few years of federal and congressional investigations, criminal indictments for firearms and tax law violations, and negative media exposure of the younger Biden's myriad alleged unlawful misdeeds.

But that display of unconditional devotion from the father toward the son hasn't sat well with some Biden administration officials, at least in the State Department, as internal documents reveal that serious concerns were raised about their several joint public appearances over the last two years, Breitbart reported.

In essence, those officials were worried about the bad publicity and probing questions those appearances created and scrambled behind the scenes to craft reasonable excuses and acceptable responses to diminish the unwanted scrutiny of investigators, the media, and the voting public.

"Why is Hunter Biden anywhere near this administration ever?"

The U.K.'s The Telegraph recently used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain multiple internal State Department documents that showed various officials raising questions about why Hunter Biden, given the ongoing investigations that targeted him, was so often seen publicly close to President Biden.

They were concerned about not just the negative publicity for the president and the possible impact it would have on his re-election chances, but also how senior department officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, would respond to inevitable questions from the media.

The overarching theme of the frustrations was summed up in an April 28, 2022, message from an unnamed official to the State Department's House director, Stacey Thompson -- sent after Hunter was in attendance at the annual White House Easter Egg Roll event more than a week earlier -- that bluntly asked, "But also, why is Hunter Biden anywhere near this administration ever?"

Prepared talking points and "political pivots" for questions about Hunter Biden

The Telegraph reported that in a separate email chain about a week earlier, other unnamed officials warned their colleagues that it was "only a matter of time" before journalists began asking the State Department probing questions about the scandalous contents of Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop.

They suggested it "might be worth having a few lines in our back pocket" that could be immediately deployed as pre-packaged responses to such queries.

A similar email chain nearly a year later in March 2023 also discussed the need to craft preset "political pivots" that Sec. Blinken could use to shift the subject and avoid directly answering any questions he may receive about the president and his son, the ongoing federal and congressional probes, the laptop's contents, and the family's dubious foreign business dealings, among other things.

Hunter will face separate criminal trials in June on gun and tax law violations

Breitbart reported that, perhaps as part of a deliberate PR campaign by the White House to downplay the severity of the scandals surrounding Hunter Biden, the son and the father were often witnessed together on several occasions between 2021 and 2023, including for family gatherings and vacations as well as official White House events.

That strategy appears to have been ended, or at least toned down, after the negative blowback that arose following Hunter's public defiance in December 2023 of a lawful congressional subpoena to testify in front of a Republican-led committee -- testimony he later delivered quietly behind closed doors.

Hunter has reportedly been the subject of a federal investigation since at least 2018, and now faces two separate criminal indictments pressed by Special Counsel David Weiss for multiple tax law violations and for lying about his habitual illicit drug use on a federal gun purchase form.

Per Breitbart, the president's son faces a combined maximum total of 42 years in prison if convicted on all counts, and he is scheduled to stand trial in June on both of those cases.

ABC News reported Thursday that the gun charges trial, set to begin June 3, will proceed after the Third Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Hunter's request to overturn the district court's denial of his motion to dismiss those charges against him.