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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."

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.