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.
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