Quick Hit:

Former Vice President Joe Biden reportedly received sensitive information and briefings from security advisers via a personal pseudonym email. The National Archives has tens of thousands of such emails from three Biden personal pseudonym accounts used during his vice presidency.

Key Details:

• Joe Biden received sensitive communications via his private email accounts created under a fictitious identity, including foreign policy discussions with his national security adviser, schedules of meetings with Cabinet secretaries and a summary of at least one intelligence briefing to President Barack Obama.
• Several of the emails included sensitive information transmitted over an insecure Google email account that could be of value to foreign powers and hostile spy agencies.
• Biden has not offered any explanation why his private email account was used and the emails were apparently not forwarded to secure government servers.

Diving Deeper:

According to a report by Just The News, while none of the newly released emails had classification markings on them, several included sensitive information transmitted over an insecure Google email account that could be of value to foreign powers and hostile spy agencies. The latest batch involved communications mostly from 2012. For instance, Biden was forwarded an early morning briefing from then-White House counterterrorism director John Brennan to Obama on possible tsunamis hitting Hawaii in October 2012 which gave details on what the president had been told and how an emergency response would be crafted by the U. S. government.

Under the law, such communications are supposed to occur on secure government email systems. Federal employees are allowed to use a private email account only as long as they forward government-related messages to their official work account in order to preserve the conversations so they can later be made available to the public or accessed by oversight groups. In 2017 the Trump administration was pilloried for allegedly failing to follow this rule. To date Biden has not offered any explanation why his private email account was used and the emails were apparently not forwarded to secure government servers.

The White House has yet to address why Biden chose to use fake account names. Ironically, Biden was vice-president when President Obama introduced on his first day in office, the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, boasting that it would usher in "a new era of open and accountable government meant to bridge the gap between the American people and their government."

The Archives says it has tens of thousands of such emails from three Biden personal pseudonym accounts used during his vice presidency. One sensitive email hinted at frictions between Obama and Biden which emerged on television talk shows over the raid that killed reviled terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, who ordered the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on America. Biden had opposed the raid.

Several of the more sensitive emails involved communications with Antony Blinken, now Biden's Secretary of State and then the vice president's chief security adviser. For instance, during a period of tensions between the Kurds and Iraqis in the Middle East, Blinken sent several emails to Biden with observations about the Mosul region on Aug. 22, 2012.