Obama briefing memos, sensitive foreign conversations forwarded to Biden private email, memos show

Briefing materials for President Barack Obama, subjects and times for White House Situation Room meetings and discussions about sensitive conversations with foreign leaders and even fallout from leaked National Security Agency intercepts were forwarded to Joe Biden's private pseudonymous email accounts when he was vice president, according to a new tranche of documents turned over to Just the News by the National Archives. 

Security experts and lawmakers, who reviewed the records, said they were disturbed by the nonchalant transmission of sensitive government information to Biden's insecure private email accounts and believed it put national security at risk.

“The new set of emails from Joe Biden's time as Vice President are very troubling and are more evidence that Biden believed he did not have to abide by classification and document handling regulations,” former CIA analyst and former Trump National Security Council chief of staff Fred Fleitz told Just the News. 

Several hundred pages of emails from 2011 to 2015 were released to Just the News and its public interest law firm partner the Southeastern Legal Foundation as part on an ongoing Freedom of Information Act litigation.

They build on prior evidence that then-Vice President  Biden was using the pseudonymous accounts for sensitive discussions with close advisors about official business ranging from domestic politics to sensitive foreign policy matters.

Just the News has not been able yet to determine if any of them were "classified," in part because many documents were redacted or withheld in their entirety except for subject line. For instance, one fully withheld email from January 19, 2015, includes the subject "The President's Briefing Materials." 

Applicable federal regulations aren't limited to classified material, and instead strictly limit federal employees' use of commercial email to conduct government business.

As for the contents, each federal agency has its own definition of "sensitive." The U.S. Air Force, for example calls it "controlled unclassified information" in a memo about email, while the U.S. Department of Labor is even more restrictive, directing federal employees to "NOT use your personal email or social media accounts for official matters. This raises record-keeping issues and potentially puts confidential information at risk."

"He didn't care about document security"

Security experts say the use of a private email for government business, which is restricted by federal regulations, opens the door for adversaries to gather intelligence on the key decision makers and represents an entirely preventable breach. That, coupled with Biden's admitted storage of classified documents at his home, raises concerns. 

“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 (robinware45@gmail.com) put sensitive government emails on gmail servers where they could easily have been hacked.” 

Fleitz reviewed about two dozen emails pulled from the collection by Just the News and said, “I am concerned that the text of at least eight of the emails was withheld, probably due to classified content.”

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., the chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said the Archives stonewalled his earlier effort to probe Biden's private emails and vowed to get to the bottom of whether any laws were broken.

“Over the last several years, Senator Grassley and I pressed the Biden White House and the National Archives for information and records on Joe Biden’s use of pseudonyms and personal email addresses for official government business,” Johnson told Just the News. “The Biden administration failed to respond to those requests.

“The public deserves to know what Joe Biden received and sent in his official capacity on his non-government email accounts, whether his actions jeopardized national security, and if he violated any federal record-keeping and archival requirements,” he said.

Nearly all federal agencies prohibit or restrict government employees from using private emails to ensure compliance with the Federal Records Act, the law that requires federal records to be preserved and available for public inspection. If officials do use private email for their work, they are obligated to forward the information to their work accounts to ensure their preservation.

Among the new materials released by The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to Just the News through the Southeastern Legal Foundation are several email communications between Biden and his close advisors and staff about sensitive subjects like a call with Iraq’s prime minister, Situation Room meetings and information about briefing memos. 

In September 2014, for instance, then-Vice President Biden’s deputy national security advisor Jeffrey Prescott emailed his boss about several foreign policy memos touching on Iraq policy, Israel and Poland that were delivered to the vice presidential residence. 

“Your book has been sent to the residence. It includes everything we have discussed except the Christians memo,” Prescott wrote. “The Christians memo is being finished now and will be sent by 11:00pm tonight (but will likely reach you in the early morning).” 

He added, “The Israel memo is in your book tonight,” and “The call sheet for Polish PM Tusk is in your book tonight.”

You can read that email below: 

Biden used "robinware456@gmail.com" among others

The following month, Prescott sent Biden information about a call with Iraqi prime minister. “Re: Abadi call (Government Formation / Amerli),” reads the subject line of the October 2014 email sent to Biden’s “robinware456@gmail.com" email account. 

The content of the communication was withheld from the FOIA release, citing the B(5) exemption, which covers confidential communications about policy deliberations between the president and his advisors or between such advisors, according to NARA.

It is likely a reference to Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi who served in that role from September 2014 to October 2018 in the Iraqi city of Amerli, which earlier that year was under siege by the Islamic State for 50 days until a joint U.S.-Iraq force broke through in August. 

The emails also showed Biden’s advisors forwarded information about internal State Department discussions with world leaders. 

After National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden released documents that showed that the personal phone calls and emails of Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff were being monitored by the agency, State Department officials were elated that Rousseff decided not to blame the administration publicly.

“Very good news. When I recently asked whether Rousseff had said anything about disclosures in the wake of the meeting with the VP—as we had decided in Brasilia that we’d try and let her characterize that issue publicly—I was told she had not, yet. Now she has, and it’s quite encouraging,” one State Department official wrote. Prescott then forwarded that email to Vice President Biden’s personal Gmail account. 

You can read the email below: 

Several emails include subjects that reference a “Briefing Book,” though the content has been withheld by the National Archives. These emails, which were sent to Biden’s private Gmail account, raise concerns about potential classified or other sensitive information being made available to adversaries, hackers or even the email provider. 

“Government policy says you are not supposed to do business outside the government system” for a reason, retired FBI Executive Assistant Director Chris Piehota told Just the News. “Those systems are not considered secure because they can be attacked from the outside or monitored by the provider. Providers can see anything. These are insecure systems for government business.” 

Piehota said the problem with someone at that level of government doing business on a private account, even if no classified information is shared, is that it can provide “information at the level of intuition or context” for an adversary, that when combined with other intelligence, can provide a more complete picture of an administration’s or official’s motivations and plans. 

“You can put things together from information sources” which is “supplemented with aggregating information from others sources.” He continued, “Once you start putting that picture together, now you have 75-80% operational picture.”

82,000 pages of emails to and from Biden's fake name email accounts

The memos reviewed by Just the News are part of several batches of communications released by the National Archives under pressure from a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Southeastern Legal Foundation. The suit was prompted by Just the News' reporting three years ago revealing that Biden used at least three different pseudonymic private email accounts when he was Barack Obama’s vice president. 

In a court filing last October, NARA disclosed that it had located 82,000 pages of emails Biden sent or received on three email accounts using fake names, dwarfing the number involved in the Hillary Clinton email scandal. The existence of the records suggests that even though Biden was using private email addresses to conduct business, the fact that they were preserved meets some of — but not all — of the criteria mandated by federal law.

An incendiary State Department review of Hillary Clinton's misuse of personal email during her time as Secretary of State also provided another reason why experts say private email shouldn't be used. "The use of a private email system to conduct official business added an increased degree of risk of compromise as a private system lacks the network monitoring and intrusion detection capabilities of State Department networks," the final report noted.

This is not the first time that Biden has faced scrutiny for his handling of government information while he was vice president. Last year, Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Hur concluded that Biden willfully kept classified documents from his time as vice president, shared them with an author, and knew he had them as far back as 2017, but recommended against prosecution, describing him as a "well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."

Biden, in an angry rebuttal, said his "memory was fine." Although staffers and legacy media rallied behind Biden at the time, less than five months later Biden would step down from the Democratic ticket and yielded to Democratic insiders pushing Kamala Harris as a replacement.