House Impeachment Probe Puts New Focus on Getting Thousands of Biden’s ‘Fake Name’ Emails That Were Sent to Hunter
The White House has for months refused to turn over much of the correspondence from Vice President Biden using pseudonyms such as ‘Robin Ware.’
The panel leading the impeachment inquiry against President Biden, the House Oversight Committee, is focusing on acquiring thousands of pseudonymous emails sent by the then-vice president to friends and family, including to his troubled son, Hunter.
While Mr. Biden has consistently denied knowing anything about Hunter’s foreign business dealings, he copied his son on dozens of emails related to Hunter’s business affairs that traded on the Biden family name to reap millions of dollars from foreign entities in Communist China, Ukraine, and other countries. While House investigators have records of the emails’ existence along with their sender and recipients, they do not know the content of the emails and are seeking to gain access to them. The White House and National Archives are resisting.
“I think one of the most important amounts of documentation that we need are those pseudonym emails,” the Oversight Committee’s chairman, James Comer, told Fox News on Tuesday night. “Remember, no one knew about the pseudonym emails until a few months ago we found that Joe Biden was using at least three fake names on government emails.”
Mr. Biden used at least three aliases in his private email correspondence — “Robert Peters,” “Robin Ware,” and “JRB Ware.”
Mr. Comer began seeking these records in August, claiming that the private emails were used to conduct official government business, specifically with respect to Ukraine, where his son was sitting on the board of an energy conglomerate, Burisma.
“At 9:00 a.m. on May 27, 2016, Vice President Biden took a call with the president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko,” Mr. Comer wrote in his August letter to the National Archives and Records Administration raising concerns that the future first son was copied on the message. “It is concerning to the Committee, however, that this document was sent to ‘Robert L. Peters’ — a pseudonym the Committee has identified as then Vice-President Biden. Additionally, the Committee questions why the then-Vice President’s son, Hunter Biden — and only Hunter Biden — was copied on this email to then-Vice President Biden.”
A spokeswoman for the Oversight Committee previously told the Sun that the president’s promise to run the “most transparent” administration in history has not been the reality.
“The Committee has spoken with the National Archives about Chairman Comer’s request,” the spokeswoman, Jessica Collins, said in a statement to the Sun. “National Archives officials have indicated they have sent some of the records to representatives for former President Obama and Joe Biden for their approval to be released. President Biden promised the most transparent administration in history and we fully expect him to approve the release of these records.”
The House Ways and Means Committee, which is also playing an active role in the ongoing impeachment inquiry, released records related to these email addresses on December 5. The messages show that the president sent emails to his son’s business associate, Eric Schwerin, more than 30 times and copied his son on alias messages on more than 50 occasions.
The White House and NARA have turned over thousands of pages of documents to the impeachment inquiry committees, but Mr. Comer and his colleagues say that they have not been transparent enough about the pseudonymous emails.
The Ways and Means Committee chairman, Jason Smith, said the records vindicate the two Internal Revenue Service whistleblowers who claim that political appointees at the Department of Justice stymied the years-long probe into the first son.
“Through months of testifying for hours and producing hundreds of pages of documentation, and just as many months of baseless attacks against them, their story has remained the same and their credibility intact,” Mr. Smith said of the whistleblowers, Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler. “The same cannot be said for President Biden. So far, our witnesses have produced over eleven-hundred pages of evidence, sat for 14 hours of closed-door testimony with counsel from the majority and minority on this committee, testified publicly before the Oversight Committee, and today, have provided us with new evidence.”