Editor’s note: House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer asked the National Archives on Aug. 16, 2023, to turn over unredacted records in which President Biden used a pseudonym during his vice presidency — as Republicans move closer to launching an impeachment inquiry into his role in son Hunter’s foreign business dealings. This column on Biden’s use of private email addresses was originally published in July 2021.
As vice president, Joe Biden kept a variety of private email addresses from which he would sometimes forward and receive government correspondence, Hunter Biden’s laptop shows.
“Robin Ware,” “Robert L. Peters” and “JRB Ware” were three such pseudonyms on emails that mixed official and family business.
In a four-week period in 2016, for instance, John Flynn, who worked in the Office of the Vice President, sent Joe his official daily schedule to his private email address Robert.L.Peters@pci.gov and copied Hunter.
There were 10 such emails copied to Hunter between May 18 and June 15, 2016.
In one email from Flynn to Joe, a.k.a. Robert Peters, on May 26, 2016, and copied to Hunter, the schedule includes “8.45am prep for 9am phonecall with Pres Poroshenko.”
Petro Poroshenko was president of Ukraine and, at the time, Hunter was being paid $83,333 a month to sit on the board of corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings Ltd. Hunter introduced top Burisma executive Vadym Pozharsky to his father in April 2015 at a dinner at Café Milano in Washington, DC.
In December 2015, Biden famously threatened Poroshenko that he would withhold $1 billion in US aid unless he fired Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who at the time was investigating Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky. Shokin was removed from office on March 29, 2016.
State Department officials have testified that they tried to raise concerns directly with Biden that his son’s Burisma involvement was a conflict of interest that undermined US anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine, but they were rebuffed.
Joe forwarded another email about Ukraine through one of his pseudonymous private email addresses, RobinWare456@gmail.com, to Hunter and his brother Beau, then Delaware attorney general, on March 26, 2012.
The email was from Deputy Secretary of State (now Secretary of State) Antony Blinken, forwarding an email from 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.”
The Robert Peters email address used a @pci.gov domain, a service labeled as problematic by the DNS Institute’s Domain Name System security report last year.
The use of private email not only could represent a conflict of interest with official duties, the services are also more prone to hacking than government accounts.
John Solomon, founder of the Just the News media organization, drew comparisons this week between Joe Biden’s use of private email addresses and Hillary Clinton’s private email server, pointing out that, under federal records law, the then-vice president had an obligation to preserve all emails involving his government work.
“The Presidential Records Act required Joe Biden to make sure that any of his gmail account emails, including these emails to Hunter Biden, were forwarded to a government account so they could properly be handled by the National Archives,” Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, told Just the News.
Hunter’s former partner Tony Bobulinski was warned of the need for discretion about Joe’s role: “Don’t mention Joe being involved, it’s only when u are face to face,” wrote James Gilliar, another business partner of Hunter’s, in a WhatsApp message on May 20, 2017. “I know u know that but they are paranoid.”
