Showing posts with label Chuck Grassley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chuck Grassley. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 29, 2023

National Archives admits it has thousands of VP Joe Biden emails in which he used aliases to communicate with many including Hunter Biden about both government and family business

 

National Archives reveals it has 5,400 Biden emails in which the president potentially used FAKE NAMES to forward government information and discuss business with son Hunter
 

President Joe Biden may have used pseudonyms in nearly 5,400 emails, electronic records and documents when he was vice president, a bombshell letter from the National Archives and Records Administration reveals.

The trove of communications was confirmed after the Southeastern Legal Foundation (SLF) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for emails connected to aliases allegedly used by Biden, including Robin Ware, Robert L. Peters, and JRB Ware.

Republicans have been demanding the release of the emails they say could show Biden used the names to discuss foreign business with his son and share information on countries where he was doing deals.

The White House has insisted Biden was never in business with his son, and vice presidents and high-level government officials often use pseudonyms to prevent being inundated with spam and emails from the public.

At the time, the Obama administration dismissed criticism the communications were 'secret' because they were all archived.

But the sheer volume of emails raises questions over whether then-VP Biden broke the 'absolute wall' he said he maintained between the 'the personal and private, and the government'. 

Emails from Hunter's laptop also reveal business partners referred to Biden as the 'big guy'.

The SLF submitted the FOIA request in June 2022 and the results appear to confirm that Biden was using the emails connected to the aliases.

Biden used various private email addresses from which he sometimes sent, received and forwarded government correspondence.

The names are all pseudonyms that Biden was known to use while he served as Vice President under Barack Obama from 2009 to 2017 and were used on emails that were about both official and family business.

The Southeastern Legal Foundation took legal action against NARA on Monday to secure the records' release. 

The Foundation alleges that the documents might potentially demonstrate instances where President Biden forwarded government information and discussed government matters with his son, Hunter Biden, together with other individuals.

'All too often, public officials abuse their power by using it for their personal or political benefit. When they do, many seek to hide it. The only way to preserve governmental integrity is for NARA to release Biden's nearly 5,400 emails to SLF and thus the public. 

'The American public deserves to know what is in them,' Kimberly Hermann, SLF general counsel, said in a statement. 

The Southeastern Legal Foundation also accuses NARA of using delaying tactics ever since the initial FOIA request was filed more than 14 months ago.

No specific emails have been provided despite NARA acknowledging their existence.

'We have performed a search of our collection for Vice Presidential records related to your [June 9, 2022] request and have identified approximately 5,138 email messages, 25 electronic files and 200 pages of potentially responsive records that must be processed in order to respond to your request,' Stephannie Oriabure, director of NARA's archival operations division, wrote to the Southeastern Legal Foundation on in June  2022, the lawsuit revealed. 

Earlier this month, Kentucky Republican James Comer, Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, demanded unredacted records from NARA, that similarly showed President Biden's use of a pseudonym during his vice presidency.

On that occasion, the purpose was to look into the role the former vice president played in his son's international business dealings.

Previously released emails from Hunter Biden's laptop indicated President Biden used the email address 'Robert.L.Peters@pci.gov' during his time as Vice President.

The emails also revealed correspondence between his aide and Hunter Biden over Joe Biden's daily schedule.

For at least four weeks in 2016, a worker in the Office of the Vice President, John Flynn, would send Biden his daily schedule to his private email address,  Robert.L.Peters@pci.gov while copying in Hunter.

There were 10 such e-mails which were copied to Hunter between May 18 and June 15, 2016.   

The Robert Peters e-mail address used a @pci.gov domain. The service had been labeled as problematic by the DNS Institute's Domain Name System security report in 2020.

One email from Flynn to being sent to Joe, a.k.a Robert Peters, from May 2016 which was also cc'd to Hunter schedules '8.45am prep for 9am phonecall with Pres Poroshenko' who was the Ukrainian president. 

At the time, Hunter was being paid $83,333 a month to sit on the board of corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings Ltd. 

He had started working for Burisma in 2014 and finally departed two months after his father left the office of vice president.

Just months earlier, in December 2015, Biden had threatened Poroshenko that he would withhold $1 billion in US aid unless he fired Ukraine's top prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was investigating the owner of Burisma,  Mykola Zlochevsky. 

Shokin was widely accused of corruption and removed from office in March 2016.

State Department officials are said to have attempted to raise concerns with directly with Biden about Hunter's involvement with Burisma but the complaints were rebuffed. 

Another forwarded email from Joe Biden using one of his alias private emails, RobinWare456@gmail.com, saw him write to both Hunter and his brother Beau, who was the Delaware attorney general, on March 26, 2012. 

The forwarded e-mail was from Deputy Secretary of State (and now current Secretary of State) Antony Blinken.

The email was from the US Ambassador to Ukraine John Tefft: 'Beau visited Kyev [Ukraine] on the Friday and gave a talk on corruption at the Hyatt . . . then attended reception at the residence where he met many young Ukrainian lawyers. We received many compliments on his presentation and for simply a frank discussion of a problem that still bedevils this country.' 

Hunter started working for Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas company, in 2014. 

He earned $83,333-a-month from Burisma until two months after Biden left office. 

He was referred to as 'the big guy' and described in an email from a Ukrainian executive at Burisma which suggested he'd gotten access to him through Hunter. 

It raised serious questions because the executive was also being investigated by a Ukrainian prosecutor who was ousted after Joe leveraged $1billion in American aide money to get him out.

President Biden has in the past denied ever offering access to him or the White House to any of Hunter's business associates. 

Biden has long claimed there was complete separation between his family's business activities and his vice presidential responsibilities but Rep. Comer said that evidence appears to suggest otherwise. 

'Joe Biden has stated there was 'an absolute wall' between his family's foreign business schemes and his duties as Vice President, but evidence reveals that access was wide open for his family's influence peddling,' Comer said in a statement on August 17.

'The National Archives must provide these unredacted records to further our investigation into the Biden family's corruption,' he added.

One concerning May 2016 email referenced in Comer’s letter and previously reported by DailyMail.com shows White House staffers sent Joe’s schedule, including a call with then-Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, to Joe’s secret email ‘Robert L. Peters’.

The staffer, John Flynn, also inexplicably copied Hunter, who was working for allegedly corrupt Ukrainian gas firm Burisma at the time, on the email.

White House staffers copied Hunter on a total of 10 emails to Joe’s alias addresses, records from his laptop show.

Joe and Hunter appeared to use the then-VP’s secret email to discuss government business in another incident in June 2014.

Hunter used his Rosemont Seneca consultancy email address to write to his father on June 23, 2014 about the employment of then-deputy White House counsel John McGrail.

‘Before you fill position pls talk to me — J. McGrail very much wants to serve as detail fr treasury,’ Hunter wrote.

‘Re Johnny call me right away Dad,’ Joe wrote back from the email robinware456@gmail.com.

McGrail was promoted to VP’s counsel the following year, then got his desired move to the Treasury as Senior Counsel in January 2017. He is currently Counselor to the Under Secretary for Domestic Finance at the department, according to his LinkedIn account.

Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson have been asking for unredacted records from NARA regarding Joe’s alias emails since 2021.

In their letters they cited the Presidential Records Act which requires POTUS to provide copies of all communications involving government business, whether on personal email addresses or not, to the National Archives.

Comer has now also joined the push. In his August 17 letter to NARA, he pointed out that the emails challenge Joe’s previous claim that while VP he had ‘an absolute wall between the personal and private, and the government’.

‘Evidence reveals that access was wide open for his family’s influence peddling,’ Comer said in a statement last week.

‘We already have evidence of then-Vice President Biden speaking, dining, and having coffee with his son’s foreign business associates. We also know that Hunter Biden and his associates were informed of then-Vice President Biden’s official government duties in countries where they had a financial interest.

‘The National Archives must provide these unredacted records to further our investigation into the Biden family’s corruption.’

Other emails show Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote to Joe using his alias addresses while acting as National Security Advisor to then-VP Joe.

Blinken forwarded a March 26 2012 email from Ukraine ambassador John Tefft to Joe’s ‘Robin Ware’ address, describing a speech given by Beau to Ukrainian members of parliament in Kyiv on the topic of corruption.

Saturday, June 24, 2023

I don't know but I'm guessing her initials are Lesley Wolf

The question remains who within the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office withheld the FD-1023 from Shapley and his team when Barr had directed that the CHS’s reporting be sent there for further investigation. Further, Barr has recently confirmed the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office was briefed on the detailed allegations contained in the FD-1023, following then-U.S. Attorney Scott Brady’s conclusion that the CHS’s reporting did not appear to be misinformation. ...

Every indication suggests it was the FD-1023 that the FBI HQ’s team falsely labeled disinformation, which raises the specter that individuals in the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office were colluding with FBI HQ to protect the Biden family. It is now up to Sen. Chuck Grassley’s whistleblower to close the circle.

More.

Thursday, November 22, 2018

Senator Chuck Grassley joins President Trump in piling on Bush's Chief Justice John Roberts over Obama's judges

The track record of presidents' judicial appointees is effulgent with political consequence, which is why liberals don't want you to think about the court that way and try to mask it with the myth of judicial independence.

Liberals impose their will by judicial fiat because they can't get their policies through the ordinary democratic way by winning elections.

Hurrah for Grassley! 

Chuck Grassley to Chief Justice John Roberts: You Rebuked Trump — but Sat Silent Through Obama’s Abuse

 

 

Wednesday, September 26, 2018

Ford took polygraph Aug. 7 in MD, told Feinstein she'd be back in CA after Aug. 10: How'd she do it if afraid to fly?

She protested Grassley's invitation to testify so quickly partly on the grounds of fear of flying.

Saturday, September 22, 2018

More gas lighting from CNBC on Kavanaugh, averring Kavanaugh is surrounded by harassers







The GOP aide wasn't "for Brett Kavanaugh". The GOP aide wasn't even an "aide for the nomination" since Trump nominated Kavanaugh. No, the aide was the spokesman for Grassley's committee. Kavanaugh had no say whatsoever in who works for Grassley and who doesn't.

Total cheap shot. Total bs. Totally corrupt manipulation of language.

No wonder CNBC closed comments on its articles long ago. They're all like this.

Ford, Dems, media manipulate the public, say she agrees to meet (next Thursday when the deal was Monday)

Grassley's Twitter feed has nothing about this.

Ford says she agrees to meet next Thursday, that's all, and wants to continue the "negotiations" this afternoon.

Total bull!

When Grassley says No they'll attack him again.


Thursday, January 4, 2018

Senator Grassley says Comey's leak of his own memos included classified information

From the story here:

A top Republican senator said Wednesday that it appears former FBI Director James B. Comey leaked classified information in his effort to shape the narrative surrounding President Trump’s decision to fire him. ... He said he’s personally reviewed the seven memos, but was forced to do so in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF. “The FBI insisted that these reviews take place in a SCIF because the majority of the memos are classified,” he said. “FBI personnel refused to answer factual questions during the document reviews, including questions about the chain of custody of the documents I was reviewing, the date that they were marked classified, and who marked them as classified.”


Friday, July 28, 2017

Fusion GPS at heart of Democrat collusion with Russia against Trump, McCain their useful idiot

Kim Strassel sets the table in her column today, here, from which these excerpts:

Fusion GPS. That’s the oppo-research outfit behind the infamous and discredited “Trump dossier,” ginned up by a former British spook. Fusion co-founder Glenn Simpson also was supposed to testify at the Grassley hearing, where he might have been asked in public to reveal who hired him to put together the hit job on Mr. Trump, which was based largely on anonymous Russian sources. Turns out Democrats are willing to give up just about anything—including their Manafort moment—to protect Mr. Simpson from having to answer that question.

What if, all this time, Washington and the media have had the Russia collusion story backward? What if it wasn’t the Trump campaign playing footsie with the Vladimir Putin regime, but Democrats? The more we learn about Fusion, the more this seems a possibility. ...

What if it was the Democratic National Committee or Hillary Clinton’s campaign [that hired Simpson]? What if that money flowed from a political entity on the left, to a private law firm, to Fusion, to a British spook, and then to Russian sources? Moreover, what if those Kremlin-tied sources already knew about this dirt-digging, tipped off by Mr. Akhmetshin? What if they specifically made up claims to dupe Mr. Steele, to trick him into writing this dossier?


Tuesday, July 18, 2017

McConnell reportedly set to bring full repeal bill like HR 3762 to a vote in the Senate

Here and here for the story.

There were 52 "Yeas" for the HR 3762 Obamacare repeal bill in the Senate on December 3, 2015 out of 54 Republicans, which Obama subsequently vetoed. It was the only repeal bill ever to reach Obama's desk:

Alexander of Tennessee
Ayotte of New Hampshire (seat lost to Democrats in 2016)
Barrasso of Wyoming
Blunt of Missouri
Boozman of Arkansas
Burr of North Carolina
Capito of West Virginia
Cassidy of Louisiana
Coats of Indiana (Todd Young)
Cochran of Mississippi
Corker of Tennessee
Cornyn of Texas
Cotton of Arkansas
Crapo of Idaho
Cruz of Texas
Daines of Montana
Enzi of Wyoming
Ernst of Iowa
Fischer of Nebraska
Flake of Arizona
Gardner of Colorado
Graham of South Carolina
Grassley of Iowa
Hatch of Utah
Heller of Nevada
Hoeven of North Dakota
Inhofe of Oklahoma
Isakson of Georgia
Johnson of Wisconsin
Lankford of Oklahoma
Lee of Utah
McCain of Arizona
McConnell of Kentucky
Moran of Kansas
Murkowski of Alaska
Paul of Kentucky
Perdue of Georgia
Portman of Ohio
Risch of Idaho
Roberts of Kansas
Rounds of South Dakota
Rubio of Florida
Sasse of Nebraska
Scott of South Carolina
Sessions of Alabama (Luther Strange)
Shelby of Alabama
Sullivan of Alaska
Thune of South Dakota
Tillis of North Carolina
Toomey of Pennsylvania
Vitter of Louisiana (John Neely Kennedy)
Wicker of Mississippi.

There were two Republican "Nays":

Collins of Maine, who is still there
Kirk of Illinois, who lost his seat to the Democrats.

Now out of 52 Republicans in the Senate we have 48 votes this time for repeal that we had last time, plus 3 Republican freshman in the Senate to pressure to vote for repeal, which would bring the total to 51, assuming Collins of Maine again votes "Nay".

We'll see if they have the guts.

Thursday, May 11, 2017

Grassley wants to end the EB-5 visa program altogether, but Cornyn wants to end the EB-5 cap

Grassley would end the issuance of these "buy-your-way-in" visas, but the Texas Senator would open up the program to thousands more.

Story here.

Sunday, March 26, 2017

Flashback January 1, 2013, 0159 hours: Senate Republicans who voted against making the Bush tax cuts permanent

From the roll call vote (89-8-3) here:

Grassley of Iowa, Lee of Utah, Paul of Kentucky, Rubio of Florida, Shelby of Alabama.

Demented Jim of South Carolina didn't vote, and neither did Mark Kirk of Illinois (stroke victim).

Democrats still controlled the Senate at the time, the close of the 112th Congress, 53-47. Their caucus power increased by 2 in the 113th Congress.

Sunday, December 14, 2014

US Senate votes 56-40 last night just before 10PM to approve Cromnibus spending bill

The 40 votes against this p.o.s. illustrate the minority which represents what passes for the extreme wings of the two political gangs which tyrannize this country:

22 Democrats

Blumenthal (D-CT)
Booker (D-NJ)
Boxer (D-CA)
Brown (D-OH)
Cantwell (D-WA)
Franken (D-MN)
Gillibrand (D-NY)
Harkin (D-IA)
Hirono (D-HI)
Klobuchar (D-MN)
Levin (D-MI)
Manchin (D-WV)
Markey (D-MA)
McCaskill (D-MO)
Menendez (D-NJ)
Merkley (D-OR)
Reed (D-RI)
Sanders (I-VT)
Tester (D-MT)
Warren (D-MA)
Whitehouse (D-RI)
Wyden (D-OR)

18 Republicans

Corker (R-TN)
Crapo (R-ID)
Cruz (R-TX)
Flake (R-AZ)
Grassley (R-IA)
Heller (R-NV)
Johnson (R-WI)
Lee (R-UT)
McCain (R-AZ)
Moran (R-KS)
Paul (R-KY)
Portman (R-OH)
Risch (R-ID)
Rubio (R-FL)
Scott (R-SC)
Sessions (R-AL)
Shelby (R-AL)
Vitter (R-LA)

Four senators decided showing up wasn't worth it:

Chambliss (R-GA)
Coburn (R-OK)
Feinstein (D-CA)
Inhofe (R-OK)

These are the 24 Republican traitors to fiscal conservatism who voted for the bill:

Alexander (R-TN)
Ayotte (R-NH)
Barrasso (R-WY)
Blunt (R-MO)
Boozman (R-AR)
Burr (R-NC)
Coats (R-IN)
Cochran (R-MS)
Collins (R-ME)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Enzi (R-WY)
Fischer (R-NE)
Graham (R-SC)
Hatch (R-UT)
Hoeven (R-ND)
Isakson (R-GA)
Johanns (R-NE)
Kirk (R-IL)
McConnell (R-KY)
Murkowski (R-AK)
Roberts (R-KS)
Thune (R-SD)
Toomey (R-PA)
Wicker (R-MS)

And these the 32 Democrats:

Baldwin (D-WI)
Begich (D-AK)
Bennet (D-CO)
Cardin (D-MD)
Carper (D-DE)
Casey (D-PA)
Coons (D-DE)
Donnelly (D-IN)
Durbin (D-IL)
Hagan (D-NC)
Heinrich (D-NM)
Heitkamp (D-ND)
Johnson (D-SD)
Kaine (D-VA)
King (I-ME)
Landrieu (D-LA)
Leahy (D-VT)
Mikulski (D-MD)
Murphy (D-CT)
Murray (D-WA)
Nelson (D-FL)
Pryor (D-AR)
Reid (D-NV)
Rockefeller (D-WV)
Schatz (D-HI)
Schumer (D-NY)
Shaheen (D-NH)
Stabenow (D-MI)
Udall (D-CO)
Udall (D-NM)
Walsh (D-MT)
Warner (D-VA).

Screwing the American people is a bipartisan affair, but leans Democrat 1.3:1.

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Liberal Senate Republicans Stand in the Way on Passage of Ryan Budget

As reported here.

They might as well switch parties:

Mitch McConnell
Susan Collins
Scott Brown
Olympia Snowe
Kay Bailey Hutchison
Dick Lugar
Chuck Grassley.