We learned this week that the National Archives has retrieved nine more boxes of official documents from the Boston office of President Biden’s lawyer. We have yet to learn whether any of the documents were classified.
Former Trump adviser Stephen Miller has also succeeded in obtaining emails bearing on the Biden family business. The National Archives has posted records responding to Miller’s FOIA request via this site. I don’t find the documents easy to access and haven’t reviewed them, but Josh Gerstein et al. peek inside them in yesterday’s edition of Politico West Wing Playbook. They write:
Newly-released emails from JOE BIDEN’s tenure as vice president show his aides scrambling to respond in 2014 to ethics questions about his son joining the board of a Ukrainian energy company. They also reveal how the White House kept close tabs on reports that Hunter Biden was forced out of the Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine.
I think there is a certain entertainment value to this:
The emails show Biden spokesman Karen Barkoff seeking help responding to an inquiry asking whether his position on Burisma’s board represented a conflict of interest for the old man. Hunter Biden’s response seems to me limited to entertainment value: “Interesting. Burisma is completely independent of Ukrainian government with an independent board of directors….I joined the board as legal adviser and Burisma also engaged the law firm I am of counsel to Boies Schiller Flexner on matters pertaining to corporate governance, transparency and expansion.”
Same here:
One email released by the Archives is from Russian TV network NTV. In it, producer NATALYA USENKO lavished Hunter Biden with praise, while asking for an interview with his father.
“Mr. Hunter Biden has recently become a member of Committee of Directors of Burisma company. We would like to congratulate him and wish him good luck!” Usenko wrote. “Would you be so kind to help us to organize an interview with Mr. Joseph Biden so that he could tell us his attitude towards and tell us if it will influence the foreign policy of the USA.”
“What a charming letter!” the VP’s communications director, SHAILAGH MURRAY, commented to colleagues. (No interview was granted.)
The Playbook reporters add this explanatory note: “The Archives appear to be treating the president’s son as a third party and not claiming privacy or deliberative exemptions for him. His email address from the time was even left in the released messages. Under federal law, the Archives can withhold many internal Obama White House deliberations from public view until 2029.”
There is more to come: “Three more batches of records are due out from the Archives over the next couple of months.”
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