For nearly a decade, Joe Biden used multiple email aliases to send hundreds of messages to his son Hunter’s former business partner, a Republican-led House committee leading the impeachment inquiry into the president revealed Tuesday.
The 11-page log of emails allegedly sent and received by Joe Biden between 2010 and 2019 was obtained by the House Ways and Means Committee through metadata provided by IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler.
During that nine-year-period, Joe Biden used pseudonyms, such as “robinware456,” “JRBware” and “RobertLPeters,” to correspond back and forth with his son, other family members, White House officials and Hunter’s former business partner Eric Schwerin, according to the committee.
In total, Joe Biden fired off or was privy to 327 emails with Schwerin, the founding partner and managing director of Hunter’s defunct Rosemont Seneca Partners firm.
Of those emails, 54 were exclusively between Joe Biden and Schwerin, who the committee charges as the architect of the Biden family’s “various shell companies that launder money around the world.”
The committee also found that 38 emails were sent from the White House to a Joe Biden shadow account with Hunter copied on the messages.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-Mo.) noted that several of the emails were exchanged during times when then-Vice President Biden traveled to Ukraine, while Hunter sat on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
“Vice President Biden appears to have treated Air Force 2 like a corporate jet, traveling to Ukraine and Mexico, to advance Hunter Biden’s business interests,” Smith said in a statement. “Evidence from today’s documents show right around the time of international trips like those to Ukraine, Joe Biden was emailing his son and his son’s business partner from private email accounts using aliases while Vice President.”
Before a June 2014 visit to Ukraine, Joe Biden and Schwerin had only exchanged five emails, the committee found, but after the trip, Joe Biden and Schwerin emailed 27 times.
Joe Biden bragged to the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018 that during a December 2015 trip to Kyiv he threatened to withhold $1 billion in foreign aid for Ukraine if then Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin wasn’t fired.
An FBI whistleblower has alleged that Joe Biden pushed for Shokin’s ouster because he was investigating Burisma.
The president claims he demanded Shokin’s removal because he was corrupt.
“I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. He got fired,” Joe Biden said in 2018.
While the trove of data does not include the contents of the emails, the committee says it corroborates previous testimony from the IRS whistleblowers indicating that Hunter and Schwerin had an “incredible level of access” to Joe Biden while they worked out foreign business deals during the elder Biden’s time in public office.
The House Ways and Means Committee disclosure comes after the National Archives and Records Administration acknowledged earlier this year that it is in possession of up to 82,000 pages worth of emails, electronic records and documents that potentially show Joe Biden using a pseudonym during his vice presidency, including emails pertaining to the accounts of Robin Ware, Robert L. Peters and JRB Ware.
It is unclear what topics are covered in most of the emails or who else was looped in on the messages.
