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

 

James Gordon

Updated: 08:19 EDT, 29 August 2023

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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.

The Hill's John Solomon drops a bomb on Alexandra Chalupa's head, reports she may be source of Trump-Russian collusion narrative even as she spearheaded DNC/Clinton-Ukraine collusion

Ukrainian Embassy confirms DNC contractor solicited Trump dirt in 2016:

In its most detailed account yet, the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington says a Democratic National Committee (DNC) insider during the 2016 election solicited dirt on Donald Trump’s campaign chairman and even tried to enlist the country's president to help.

In written answers to questions, Ambassador Valeriy Chaly's office says DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa sought information from the Ukrainian government on Paul Manafort’s dealings inside the country, in hopes of forcing the issue before Congress.

Chalupa later tried to arrange for Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to comment on Manafort’s Russian ties on a U.S. visit during the 2016 campaign, the ambassador said.

Chaly says that, at the time of the contacts in 2016, the embassy knew Chalupa primarily as a Ukrainian-American activist and learned only later of her ties to the DNC. He says the embassy considered her requests an inappropriate solicitation of interference in the U.S. election. ...

Reached by phone last week, Chalupa said she was too busy to talk. She did not respond to email and phone messages seeking subsequent comment. ...

Andrii Telizhenko, a former political officer who worked under Chaly from December 2015 through June 2016, told me he was instructed by the ambassador and his top deputy to meet with Chalupa in March 2016 and to gather whatever dirt Ukraine had in its government files about Trump and Manafort. ...

“She said the DNC wanted to collect evidence that Trump, his organization and Manafort were Russian assets, working to hurt the U.S. and working with Putin against the U.S. interests. She indicated if we could find the evidence they would introduce it in Congress in September and try to build a case that Trump should be removed from the ballot, from the election,” he recalled. ...

Though Chaly and Telizhenko disagree on what Ukraine did after it got Chalupa’s request, they confirm that a paid contractor of the DNC solicited their government’s help to find dirt on Trump that could sway the 2016 election.

John Solomon: Joe Biden in March 2016 pressured Ukraine to fire prosecutor investigating company paying Hunter Biden, bragged about it to CFR audience in 2018

Joe Biden's 2020 Ukrainian nightmare: A closed probe is revived:

But Ukrainian officials tell me there was one crucial piece of information that Biden must have known but didn’t mention to his audience: The prosecutor he got fired was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings that employed Biden’s younger son, Hunter, as a board member.

U.S. banking records show Hunter Biden’s American-based firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, received regular transfers into one of its accounts — usually more than $166,000 a month — from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015, during a period when Vice President Biden was the main U.S. official dealing with Ukraine and its tense relations with Russia.

The general prosecutor’s official file for the Burisma probe — shared with me by senior Ukrainian officials — shows prosecutors identified Hunter Biden, business partner Devon Archer and their firm, Rosemont Seneca, as potential recipients of money.

Shokin told me in written answers to questions that, before he was fired as general prosecutor, he had made “specific plans” for the investigation that “included interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden.” ...

The timing of Hunter Biden’s and Archer’s appointment to Burisma’s board has been highlighted in the past, by The New York Times in December 2015 and in a 2016 book by conservative author Peter Schweizer. ...

According to Schweizer’s book, Vice President Biden met with Archer in April 2014 right as Archer was named to the board at Burisma. A month later, Hunter Biden was named to the board, to oversee Burisma’s legal team.

But the Ukrainian investigation and Joe Biden’s effort to fire the prosecutor overseeing it has escaped without much public debate. ...

Between April 2014 and October 2015, more than $3 million was paid out of Burisma accounts to an account linked to Biden’s and Archer’s Rosemont Seneca firm, according to the financial records placed in a federal court file in Manhattan in an unrelated case against Archer.

Foreign Affairs Issue Launch with Former Vice President Joe Biden

Tuesday, January 23, 2018:

I was—not I, but it just happened to be that was the assignment I got. I got all the good ones. And so I got Ukraine. And I remember going over, convincing our team, our leaders to—convincing that we should be providing for loan guarantees. And I went over, I guess, the 12^th, 13^th time to Kiev. And I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor. And they didn’t. So they said they had—they were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, I’m not going to—or, we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority. You’re not the president. The president said—I said, call him. (Laughter.) I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. (Laughter.) He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.

 

Rick Gates testimony the complete opposite of MSNBC buffoon Chris Hayes: Manafort working to ally Ukraine with EU not with Kremlin

From the story here:

Gates said that their shell companies in Cyprus had transferred money between themselves in payments disguised as loans.

Manafort crafted a policy for Yanukovych aimed at bringing Ukraine into the European Union called “Engage Ukraine”.

Manafort recruited top former European politicians to help out with that effort.

Manafort’s income fell precipitously after Yanukovych stepped down in 2014.

Manafort then had trouble paying his bills.

Manafort then worked briefly advising Ukraine’s current president, Petro Poroshenko. ...

“Engage Ukraine became the strategy for helping Ukraine enter the European Union,” he told prosecutors Tuesday.

Politico's real story from January was that the DNC, the Hillary campaign, Alexandra Chalupa, Rep. Marcy Kaptur, journalists, government officials and intelligence operatives all colluded with Ukraine to take out Manafort and disrupt Trump's campaign

You should read it to appreciate the four fingers pointing back at the Democrats every time they point at Republicans yelling "collusion".

The whole article was designed to run interference for Chalupa and the Democrats, putting the best spin on it they could after uncovering the dirty details. The heart of the story begins seventeen paragraphs in, after trying in the first sixteen to make what follows not say what it says, here:

The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort’s resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia. ...

Manafort’s work for Yanukovych caught the attention of a veteran Democratic operative named Alexandra Chalupa, who had worked in the White House Office of Public Liaison during the Clinton administration. Chalupa went on to work as a staffer, then as a consultant, for Democratic National Committee. The DNC paid her $412,000 from 2004 to June 2016, according to Federal Election Commission records, though she also was paid by other clients during that time, including Democratic campaigns and the DNC’s arm for engaging expatriate Democrats around the world.

In an interview this month, Chalupa told Politico she had developed a network of sources in Kiev and Washington, including investigative journalists, government officials and private intelligence operatives. While her consulting work at the DNC this past election cycle centered on mobilizing ethnic communities — including Ukrainian-Americans — she said that, when Trump’s unlikely presidential campaign began surging in late 2015, she began focusing more on the research, and expanded it to include Trump’s ties to Russia, as well.

She occasionally shared her findings with officials from the DNC and Clinton’s campaign, Chalupa said. In January 2016 — months before Manafort had taken any role in Trump’s campaign — Chalupa told a senior DNC official that, when it came to Trump’s campaign, “I felt there was a Russia connection,” Chalupa recalled. “And that, if there was, that we can expect Paul Manafort to be involved in this election,” said Chalupa, who at the time also was warning leaders in the Ukrainian-American community that Manafort was “Putin’s political brain for manipulating U.S. foreign policy and elections.”

She said she shared her concern with Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S., Valeriy Chaly, and one of his top aides, Oksana Shulyar, during a March 2016 meeting at the Ukrainian Embassy. According to someone briefed on the meeting, Chaly said that Manafort was very much on his radar, but that he wasn’t particularly concerned about the operative’s ties to Trump since he didn’t believe Trump stood much of a chance of winning the GOP nomination, let alone the presidency.

That all started to change just four days after Chalupa’s meeting at the embassy, when it was reported that Trump had in fact hired Manafort, suggesting that Chalupa may have been on to something. She quickly found herself in high demand. The day after Manafort’s hiring was revealed, she briefed the DNC’s communications staff on Manafort, Trump and their ties to Russia, according to an operative familiar with the situation. ...

Chalupa asked embassy staff to try to arrange an interview in which Poroshenko might discuss Manafort’s ties to Yanukovych. While the embassy declined that request, officials there became “helpful” in Chalupa’s efforts, she said, explaining that she traded information and leads with them. “If I asked a question, they would provide guidance, or if there was someone I needed to follow up with.” But she stressed, “There were no documents given, nothing like that.”

Chalupa said the embassy also worked directly with reporters researching Trump, Manafort and Russia to point them in the right directions. ...

Andrii Telizhenko, who worked as a political officer in the Ukrainian Embassy under Shulyar, said [Shulyar] instructed him to help Chalupa research connections between Trump, Manafort and Russia. “Oksana said that if I had any information, or knew other people who did, then I should contact Chalupa,” recalled Telizhenko, who is now a political consultant in Kiev. “They were coordinating an investigation with the Hillary team on Paul Manafort with Alexandra Chalupa,” he said, adding “Oksana was keeping it all quiet,” but “the embassy worked very closely with” Chalupa.

In fact, sources familiar with the effort say that Shulyar specifically called Telizhenko into a meeting with Chalupa to provide an update on an American media outlet’s ongoing investigation into Manafort.

Telizhenko recalled that Chalupa told him and Shulyar that, “If we can get enough information on Paul [Manafort] or Trump’s involvement with Russia, she can get a hearing in Congress by September.”

Chalupa confirmed that, a week after Manafort’s hiring was announced, she discussed the possibility of a congressional investigation with a foreign policy legislative assistant in the office of Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), who co-chairs the Congressional Ukrainian Caucus. But, Chalupa said, “It didn’t go anywhere.”

Asked about the effort, the Kaptur legislative assistant called it a “touchy subject” in an internal email to colleagues that was accidentally forwarded to Politico.

Kaptur’s office later emailed an official statement explaining that the lawmaker is backing a bill to create an independent commission to investigate “possible outside interference in our elections.” The office added “at this time, the evidence related to this matter points to Russia, but Congresswoman Kaptur is concerned with any evidence of foreign entities interfering in our elections.” ...

In [an] email [released by Wikileaks], which was sent in early May to then-DNC communications director Luis Miranda, Chalupa noted that she had extended an invitation to the Library of Congress forum to veteran Washington investigative reporter Michael Isikoff. Two days before the event, he had published a story for Yahoo News revealing the unraveling of a $26 million deal between Manafort and a Russian oligarch related to a telecommunications venture in Ukraine. And Chalupa wrote in the email she’d been “working with for the past few weeks” with Isikoff “and connected him to the Ukrainians” at the event.

Isikoff, who accompanied Chalupa to a reception at the Ukrainian Embassy immediately after the Library of Congress event, declined to comment.

Chalupa further indicated in her hacked May email to the DNC that she had additional sensitive information about Manafort that she intended to share “offline” with Miranda and DNC research director Lauren Dillon, including “a big Trump component you and Lauren need to be aware of that will hit in next few weeks and something I’m working on you should be aware of.” Explaining that she didn’t feel comfortable sharing the intel over email, Chalupa attached a screenshot of a warning from Yahoo administrators about “state-sponsored” hacking on her account, explaining, “Since I started digging into Manafort these messages have been a daily occurrence on my yahoo account despite changing my password often.”

Dillon and Miranda declined to comment. ...

The [Financial Times] noted that Trump’s candidacy had spurred “Kiev’s wider political leadership to do something they would never have attempted before: intervene, however indirectly, in a U.S. election,” and the story quoted Leshchenko [Ukraine's parliamentarian] asserting that the majority of Ukraine’s politicians are “on Hillary Clinton’s side.” ...

[A]n operative who has worked extensively in Ukraine, including as an adviser to Poroshenko, said it was highly unlikely that either Leshchenko or the anti-corruption bureau would have pushed the issue without at least tacit approval from Poroshenko or his closest allies.

“It was something that Poroshenko was probably aware of and could have stopped if he wanted to,” said the operative. ...

Telizhenko, the former embassy staffer, said that, during the primaries, Chaly, the country’s ambassador in Washington, had actually instructed the embassy not to reach out to Trump’s campaign, even as it was engaging with those of Clinton and Trump’s leading GOP rival, Ted Cruz.

“We had an order not to talk to the Trump team, because he was critical of Ukraine and the government and his critical position on Crimea and the conflict,” said Telizhenko. “I was yelled at when I proposed to talk to Trump,” he said, adding, “The ambassador said not to get involved — Hillary is going to win.”

This account was confirmed by Nalyvaichenko, the former diplomat and security chief now affiliated with a Poroshenko opponent, who said, “The Ukrainian authorities closed all doors and windows — this is from the Ukrainian side.” He called the strategy “bad and short-sighted.”

Andriy Artemenko, a Ukrainian parliamentarian associated with a conservative opposition party, did meet with Trump’s team during the campaign and said he personally offered to set up similar meetings for Chaly but was rebuffed.

“It was clear that they were supporting Hillary Clinton’s candidacy,” Artemenko said. “They did everything from organizing meetings with the Clinton team, to publicly supporting her, to criticizing Trump. … I think that they simply didn’t meet because they thought that Hillary would win.”