The use of private e-mails are more likely to be hacked than government accounts
When Joe Biden was VP, he kept a range of personal e-mail addresses from which he would use to forward and receive government correspondence, Hunter Biden’s laptop shows.
“Robin Ware,” “Robert L. Peters” and “JRB ware” were three such pseudonyms on e-mails that mixed official and family dealings.
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 personal e-mail address Robert.L.Peters@pci.gov and sent to Hunter.
There were ten such e-mails copied to Hunter between May 18 and June 15, 2016.
In one e-mail from Flynn to Joe, or Robert Peters, on May 26, 2016, and also sent to Hunter, the schedule includes “8.45am prep for 9am phone call with Pres Poroshenko.”
Poroshenko was president of Ukraine and, at the time, Hunter was being paid $83,333 a month to sit on the board of dishonest Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings Ltd. Hunter acquainted top Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi to his father in April 2015 at a dinner at Café Milano in Washington, DC.
In December 2015, Biden notoriously threatened Poroshenko that he would withhold $1 billion in United States assistance unless he got rid of Ukraine’s top prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who at the time was probing Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky. Shokin was fired from office on March 29, 2016.
State Department officials have testified that they tried to bring up concerns directly with Biden that his son’s Burisma involvement was a conflict of interest that undermined United States anti-corruption actions in Ukraine, but they were rejected.
Joe forwarded another e-mail about Ukraine through one of his pseudonymous personal e-mail addresses, RobinWare456@gmail.com, to Hunter and his brother Beau, then Delaware attorney general, on March 26, 2012.
The e-mail was from Deputy Secretary of State (now Secretary of State) Antony Blinken, forwarding an e-mail 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 e-mail 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 personal e-mail could represent a conflict of interest with official duties, and are also more prone to hacking than government accounts.
John Solomon, creator of the Just the News media organization, found comparisons this week between Joe Biden’s use of personal e-mail addresses and Hillary Clinton’s personal e-mail server, pointing out that, under federal records law, the then-vice president had an obligation to preserve all emails relating to his government work.
“The Presidential Records Act required Joe Biden to make sure that any of his gmail account e-mails, including these e-mails 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 Gillar, another business partner of Hunter’s, in a WhatsApp message on May 20, 2017. “I know u know that but they are paranoid.”