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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28354 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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Joe Biden apparently has been using at least three pseudonyms in email communications that mixed family & government business. A legal nonprofit group filed a FOIA request more than a year ago and the National Archives said it found potentially 5,400 emails but has yet to release them.

The closest scenario I can think of was Mitt Romney using the name "Pierre Delecto" in order to maintain a lurker Twitter account, which seems whatever. Trump is also quite fond of pseudonyms. Is there any possible innocent explanation for why Biden would use a pseudonym when discussing government business? I can't think of one. Obama defended the practice when members of his administration got caught doing it but it seems very unconvincing with the existence of email filtering:

The Obama administration defended using alternate government email addresses as necessary for high-level political appointees since the flood of emails to their public inboxes made those accounts unreasonable to manage.

At a 2013 press conference, then-White House press secretary Jay Carney assured reporters that "this is a practice consistent with prior administrations of both parties, and, as the story itself made clear, any FOIA request or congressional inquiry includes a search in all of the email accounts used by any political appointee."

Another problem for him is that about 1,000 emails (where he used aliases) reference Rosemont Seneca. So much for “I don’t discuss business with my son.” Also 200 of them evidently are subject to executive privilege which begs a lot of questions.

Also, some of the emails copy Hunter and set up calls with say Burisma.

None of those are individually smoking guns but when you look at the mosaic and pattern Biden doesn’t really have a good defense.

We have three witnesses alleging he was involved in the scheme. We have a fourth say so in an email.

We have these emails you reference.

We have the twenty shell companies.

We have the meetings at Cafe Milano followed by cash payments.

We have the boast about getting the Ukrainian prosecutor fired while have contemporary state department documents praising the efforts of the prosecutor.

We know from Devon Archer the prosecutor actually had harmed Burisma persons.

We know the money for Hunter’s work was spread to the entire Biden family.

We know banks published numerous suspicious activity reports.

We have Hunter saying his dad takes half of his money and other records where they clearly co mingle funds.

We have the Biden estates yet they never came from money and didn’t make that kind of money as a Senator.

We have the years of shady business from Jim Biden.

We have the DOJ stopping appropriate inquiries/ evidence gathering that might further prove the story.

The source documents in things like the Hunter laptop have been cross checked with unrelated sources and check out.

There doesn’t seem to be a hole in the story. At the absolute best, Joe Biden was aware what his son was doing and participated in it without changing American policy. That is he “sold” his office but didn’t give anything of value. That still cannot stand and be much be removed from office.

There can be many legit reasons for a public person to use several email accounts. For example, you want one account that you give to random people you have to contact, and another high-pririty one which you give only to trusted confidantes and where you won't encounter all kinds of spam and begging for money/attention, etc. There's little legit reason that I can see to use a fake name in email. In Twitter profile - sure. If you're a public person and want to subscribe to people's feeds without people going "OMG, Public Person subscribed to me!!! Public Person liked my tweet!!!" then you use a pseudonymous account. But email doesn't work this way. Especially not when you in a public office. Then I see only one reason - to hide one's identity and to avoid disclosure, whether FOIA or otherwise, if your name somehow ends up in a communication that leaks outside. I can't see how it won't be shady.

Using an "alternate email" can be legitimate for the reason Jay Carney lays out, but that's different entirely from using a full pseudonym to avoid FOIA and its implications.

It seems undeniable at this point that Biden was involved in crooked dealings, for which Hunter was the frontman, from which Biden and family profited enormously. It would absolutely fot the pattern of Obama admin officials breaking the rules for their own convenience, but with enough complicating layers that they can argue the rules were merely bended. (Several commenters have already noted the similarity to Hillary's emails.) This behavior probably includes breaking several laws (and not just Logan Act trivialities that everyone breaks).

I don't think it's unfair to think that, if Hillary was doing it, and Joe was doing it, then Obama probably knew. Why not? He had to have known about the FBI spying on the Trump campaign. And speculating further, there are some of Feinstein's business deals, Pelosi's stock trades, McConnell's wealth, etc. There's definitely a bigger culture of profiteering at the top level of American government going on, with some room for disagreement about whether it has been merely unethical, technically illegal, or knowingly and deliberately illegal. Joe has definitely participated.

Obama defended the practice when members of his administration got caught doing it but it seems very unconvincing with the existence of email filtering:

Filtering is very lackluster, especially if you're trying to provide it to high-publicity people who aren't very tech-aware and especially where you're not just filtering between "useful" and "spam" but between several different tiers of importance and some junk that an intern still needs to go through. I wish plus-addressing was the right solution, but 95%+ of users will eventually just strip it out and e-mail to the top level instead.

That said, there's a difference between firstname.lastname.projectname and sooners7. The first does anything conventional filtering can not reliably do; the only real benefit to the latter is to avoid grepping. Political appointees are free (and required!) to keep private e-mails off of their public accounts and are free to go full Publicus for their private discussions, but the opportunity for problems are severe.

It's not the worst FOIA-evasion I've seen recently, but it's definitely going to add more reason to suspect fuckery going around.

On the flip side, it's not like anything's going to happen because of it. Even if this action 'violated the law' for NARA or whatever, it's not exactly something that gets enforced; the SLF may get some cash back for the clear violation of FOIA's statutory required response timeline, but even if they do it could well be after the 2024 election at this rate. It probably won't get anyone working in the government in actual trouble rather than just bilking some tax money.

Filtering is no less lackluster than a secret email address. A "promote anything from a source on this allowlist" rule hardly requires AI, but is already strictly superior to "tell the secret address to everyone on this allowlist and hope nobody leaks it".

"Promote anything from a source on this allowlist" requires the person to have and maintain a list of accepted sources. That works for some small projects, but a very typical use case is just "I want to pass this e-mail around to anyone who needs it, even if I don't know them, and not have it get mixed into the 1k+ emails I get already".

At a 2013 press conference, then-White House press secretary Jay Carney assured reporters that "this is a practice consistent with prior administrations of both parties, and, as the story itself made clear, any FOIA request or congressional inquiry includes a search in all of the email accounts used by any political appointee."

It's one thing if it's a .gov address with a non-obvious local part -- joe.biden@whitehouse.gov is not something I'd expect the president himself to monitor, so obviously he needs some other one.

But the use of a plausibly fake name combined with a gmail account does look much more like an attempt to deceive -- as it is, the Archives will only have emails to/from .gov addresses, not from (say) foreign government contacts who know about the alt. And if Hunter weren't such a bozo, a pretty close audit of (say) the usgov's interactions with Burisma would not have turned up Biden (Sr)'s involvement -- since nobody would know who Robert Peters (or whatever others) is.

Also, Hillary BTFO -- she said she couldn't manage to juggle even two phones/emails, so she needed the server; now here's old 'Sleepy' Joe with four+!

That and, if the conversations in question are of any sort of sensitivity (if not necessarily "classified" under one of DOD or some other agency's Top Secret/Secret/etc. schemes, just something you'd like to keep quiet), you probably don't want to leave those emails lying about on systems admined by a third party (Google, in the case of gmail). While I gather Google/gmail is somewhat better than average as ISP goes when it comes to admin access controls and keeping audit trails on admin access to user data, there's still the possibility of such admin-snooping happening. If the President really needs a second email account under an assumed name, he should probably be doing this on an account somewhere on a system run by .gov IT.

My favorite politician pseudonym is “Carlos Danger,” to the extent that I can recall it faster than “Anthony Weiner” (which already sounds like a pseudonym in itself). It’s so cheesy yet awesome and memorable; I love it.

My favorite pseudonym was Mike Vick’s “Ron Mexico” for checking in a hospital for if I recall an STD.

I’ll throw in “Joey Freshwater,” Ole Miss HC Lane Kiffin’s coed-chasing alter ego.

There are innocent contexts, but the problem for Biden is that he is associated with repeated, consistent, and public denials that he was involved in any for Hunter Biden's business deals. Any emails to that will be another albatross to Biden among non-Democratic voters, in much the same way that Hillary had her own email scandal that just sapped over time.

If Biden has said from the start that he did personal business with Hunter, the Republicans would have pounced but voters wouldn't have cared as much unless there's something actually disreputable. The bigger issue is the contrast in insisting there was no business overlap, and now even the more sympathetic media are acknowledging that family and business mix, even as they avoid directly addressing questions about Hunter. It's probably meant to mitigate, but it's a context where the innuendo (false deniale, followed by non-denials) are damaging in their own right.

It depends. The mainstream media isn’t reporting this, so it’s unlikely that the average NPC or low information voter will know about the issue at all, and among those who do, most as dismissive of the Hunter Biden stuff. So it’s unlikely that most of the people will feel strongly enough to not vote for Biden.

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