Former President Joe Biden used alias email addresses while he was vice president to communicate with his national security team, including on matters involving world leaders and foreign policy, newly-released archived records show.
The archives have produced more than 1,200 emails since October 2023, including previously unreported emails revealed Thursday by Just the News, that involved three pseudonyms Biden used to correspond with Obama administration officials.
The emails with national security officials, including Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Jeffrey Prescott, are largely or entirely redacted and cite exceptions under public records laws.
They have subject lines that reference a call with former Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi of Iraq; briefing materials for former President Barack Obama; an “SFRC business meeting,” a possible reference to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Ukraine and Russia relations; “Iraq calls,” and other sensitive information.
Biden preserved these emails, sent to or from two Gmail accounts and one government account using the names Robin Ware, JRB Ware, and Robert L. Peters, in line with federal records laws.
Biden’s and other political leaders’ use of alias emails has long been a source of scrutiny. Biden’s first captured attention during the Republican-led impeachment inquiry into the former president after the House Oversight Committee revealed that his son Hunter Biden’s computer data included emails with his father related to Ukraine.
The production of national security-related emails came in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by a conservative group called the Southeastern Legal Foundation. The group brought a FOIA lawsuit to obtain the emails with Biden’s pseudonyms in 2022. The National Archives has been releasing them on a rolling basis as part of an agreement reached with the group during court proceedings.
After the Associated Press reported in 2013 that several officials in the Obama administration were using alias email addresses, then-press secretary Jay Carney told CBS News the practice was normal and that the personal emails were not secretive and were subject to FOIA.
“Having alternate email addresses for cabinet secretaries and other high-profile officials makes eminent sense,” Carney said. “If they are inundated in one account with either public emails, or spam or the like, then they can continue to use their other account for normal work.”
Former Biden White House spokesman Ian Sams made a similar remark in 2023.
“Newsflash: government leaders for decades have used aliases to avoid spam & hacking,” Sams wrote on Aug. 29 on X.
The FBI criticized former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of private email addresses in 2016 after finding that she and her colleagues exchanged classified information with them and did not properly preserve the emails. Clinton and her colleagues were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” the FBI found, but the bureau said it did not find evidence that Clinton’s misconduct was intentional.
JOE BIDEN’S PSEUDONYMS HID UKRAINE-RELATED MESSAGES INVOLVING SON
There is no evidence at this stage that Joe Biden exchanged classified information on his alias email addresses. Still, some national security officials have raised concerns about the practice. Former Trump National Security Council chief of staff Fred Fleitz told Just the News he did not have faith in Biden to properly preserve sensitive data, pointing to a special counsel investigation that found Joe Biden mishandled classified material.
“Just like the classified documents Biden stored in his garage and home office, he again proved he didn’t care about document security,” Fleitz said. “Biden’s use of a gmail alias email address for work-related emails ([email protected]) put sensitive government emails on gmail servers where they could easily have been hacked.”