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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28305 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."

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.

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