In response to legal pressure, the National Archives has reportedly uncovered 82,000 pages of emails sent or received by Vice President Joe Biden under three covert aliases while serving as vice president, according to a federal court document obtained by Just the News on Monday.
John Solomon, an investigative writer, speculates that this amount is considerably less than the one that landed Hillary Clinton in “trouble” eight years ago. An unnoticed status report submitted in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit initiated by the Southeastern Legal Foundation against the National Archives and Records Administration reportedly disclosed the complete tally of Biden’s private email exchanges, according to the report.
Joe Biden, during his tenure as Vice President under President Barack Obama, employed three email accounts using aliases: [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected]. For the purpose of acquiring access to the communications, the foundation initiated legal proceedings.
A preliminary evaluation of the extent and variety of potential government operations conducted via Joe Biden’s personal email accounts was contained in a status report filed with a federal court in Atlanta on Monday.
“NARA has completed a search for potentially responsive documents and is currently processing those documents for the purpose of producing non-exempt portions of any responsive records on a monthly rolling basis,” the status report stated. “Given the scope of Plaintiff’s FOIA request, which seeks copies of all emails in three separate accounts over an eight-year period, the volume of potentially responsive records is necessarily large.
“NARA has identified approximately 82,000 pages of potentially responsive documents, and it is currently processing those documents and preparing any non-exempt responsive documents for production on a rolling basis,” the filing added.
According to the court filing, the foundation and NARA are deliberating how to restrict the request for records to expedite the distribution of copies of the emails.
It is impermissible for government officials to conduct official business through their personal email accounts. In accordance with the Federal Records Act, officials including Biden are obligated to retain all correspondence associated with their private accounts that are linked to the government. Considering the magnitude of NARA’s email archive, it is improbable that Biden granted access to them for the nation’s historical preservation organization.
However, the quantity disclosed by the National Archives is truly remarkable—it surpasses even the amount implicated in the most infamous private email controversy in American history—which also involved former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Obama administration business.
A State Department inspector general report from the summer of 2016 states that Mrs. Clinton conducted government business on a regular and improper basis using a private email server located in the Chappaqua, New York, residence of her family. She subsequently removed an extensive quantity of the communications that she considered private.
According to the final report, “Secretary Clinton gave the Department about 55,000 hard-copy pages from her personal email account, which she estimated to be about 30,000 emails related to official business.” These amounts are far fewer than the number of pages from Biden’s personal account that the National Archives asserts to have.
Hillary Clinton transmitted on her personal server a total of one hundred emails, of which sixty-five had “Secret” and twenty-two had “Top Secret” security classifications; each email contained information that should have been classified at the time of transmission.
Ultimately, the government successfully recovered the 52,000 deleted personal emails belonging to Hillary Clinton and disclosed them to the public in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act.
As of yet, the National Archives has not provided any indication that any of Biden’s emails comprise confidential information. On the contrary, Special Counsel Robert Hur is currently investigating accusations that the president improperly stored classified documents from his tenure as vice president and senator in the garage of his Delaware residence and in a think tank office he occupied in Washington, D.C.
Hur recently interviewed Biden for this investigation for two days.
Special Counsel Jack Smith has already indicted former President Donald Trump on charges of mishandling classified documents obtained by the FBI from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida or which Trump neglected to return to the National Archives in a timely manner.
As stated by the Inspector General, several former secretaries were impacted by a negligent record-keeping system that was prevalent at the state level and across the government.