News/Commentary

Obama-Biden admin previously defended ‘alternate email addresses’ as making ’eminent sense’

August 19, 2023 | | Print Article

President Joe Biden evidently wasn’t alone in using a secret email address during his tenure as vice president under the Obama administration.

As previously reported, this week word emerged that, as vice president, Biden had used a pseudonym email address while conducting state business.

“Emails previously released by the Archives and retrieved from Hunter’s abandoned laptop reveal that Joe Biden used the email address ‘[email protected]’ while he was President Barack Obama’s second-in-command and that his aide John Flynn cc’d Hunter on 10 emails containing the elder Biden’s daily schedule between May 18 and June 15, 2016,” the New York Post reported.

But according to Fox News, the former VP and current president wasn’t alone in this. In fact, secret email addresses were so popular in the Obama administration that then-White House press secretary Jay Carney once defended their use.

During a June 4th, 2013 press briefing, Carney was specifically asked to respond to an Associated Press report claiming that a number of senior Obama administration officials had secret email addresses.

“Some of President Barack Obama’s political appointees are using secret government email accounts to conduct official business … a practice that complicates agencies’ legal responsibilities to find and turn over emails under public records requests and congressional inquiries,” the AP reported at the time.

During the press briefing, a reporter asked, “What is the standard of transparency this administration is going to use in FOIA requests about these things, or in disclosing these going forward?”

“And is it — or has it been the policy of this administration, whenever there is a congressional inquiry about email traffic on a given subject, that both the established email address and the secondary, or secret one, is always given over to Congress?” the reporter added.

Carney replied by stating that the use of secret email addresses made “eminent sense.”

“Let’s be clear — this is a practice consistent with prior administrations of both parties, and, as the story itself made clear, any FOIA request or congressional inquiry includes a search in all of the email accounts used by any political appointee. So the answer is, all of this information is provided,” he said.

“Having alternate email addresses for Cabinet secretaries and other high-profile officials makes eminent sense, much as it does for columnists, for example, of major publications who provide email addresses for their readers but have alternate work email addresses so that if they are inundated in one account with either public emails or spam or the like, that they can continue to use their other account for normal work,” he added.

While it may make “eminent sense” to Carney, others aren’t so sure. Take the New York Post’s editorial board which penned an op-ed on Friday accusing the president of engaging in “Mafiaesque” behavior.

The board notes in the column that House Oversight Committee chair James Comer has speculated “the clear possibility that these aliases were an attempt by the then-vice president to deflect scrutiny from his dealings with son Hunter.”

The theory is that the former VP took part in and profited from his son’s shady business dealings — but that he then tried to hide his “big guy” status with a fake email address.

“What possible legitimate reason could there be for a sitting vice president to have not one, not two, but three email aliases?” the Post’s op-ed continues.

“None, of course — and the obvious illegitimate reason is a typically brazen Biden solution to an ugly problem: namely, the fact that the Obama White House was rightly worried about Hunter’s influence-peddling, er, ‘business’ career and Joe’s obvious involvement in it,” according to the board.

Of course, the current president’s involvement with his youngest son’s business dealings hasn’t been proven without a shadow of a doubt quite yet, though Comer is getting awfully close.

“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,” he said in a statement this 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,” he added.

Vivek Saxena
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