Comer says Congress has only gotten 14 pages of Joe Biden's pseudonym emails, alleges obstruction

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer on Tuesday accused the Biden administration of obstructing his impeachment inquiry, revealing it has turned over to congressional investigators just 14 of the 82,000 pages of emails that the National Archives located from Joe Biden's private pseudonym email accounts.

Comer vowed to escalate his efforts to gain access to the emails in a statement just one day after Just the News reported that the National Archives had identified in a court filing a massive trove of private emails from Joe Biden's vice presidency.

“The National Archives has identified 82,000 pages of emails where then-Vice President Joe Biden used a fake name, but the Biden White House has only cleared 14 pages in response to multiple Oversight Committee requests for documents related to then-Vice President Biden," Comer told Just the News.

"This lack of transparency from the self-identified ‘most transparent administration in history’ is looking more like obstruction every day," he added. "Congress needs full access to these records and others as part of our investigation into Joe Biden and the Biden family’s corruption. The House Oversight Committee will continue to use the power of the gavel to obtain records necessary to our investigation.”

Under legal pressure, the National Archives confirmed Monday to a court that it has located 82,000 pages of emails that Biden sent or received during his vice presidential tenure on three private pseudonym accounts. It’s a total that potentially dwarfs the amount that landed Hillary Clinton in hot water a decade ago.

The total of Biden private email exchanges was disclosed in a little-noticed status report filed in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought against the National Archives and Records Administration by the nonprofit public interest law firm the Southeastern Legal Foundation.

The foundation brought the lawsuit seeking access to the emails after Just the News revealed a year ago that Joe Biden had used three pseudonym email accounts – robinware456@gmail.com, JRBWare@gmail.com, and Robert.L.Peters@pci.gov – during the time he served as President Barack Obama’s vice president.

The status report filed Monday in a federal court in Atlanta was the first to provide an estimate of the size and scope of possible government business conducted through Joe Biden’s private email accounts.

“NARA has completed a search for potentially responsive documents and is currently processing those documents for the purpose of producing non-exempt portions of any responsive records on a monthly rolling basis,” the status report stated. “Given the scope of Plaintiff’s FOIA request, which seeks copies of all emails in three separate accounts over an eight-year period, the volume of potentially responsive records is necessarily large.

“NARA has identified approximately 82,000 pages of potentially responsive documents, and it is currently processing those documents and preparing any non-exempt responsive documents for production on a rolling basis,” the filing added.

You can read the full court filing here.

Government officials' use of private email for official business is discouraged under the law, and officials like Biden are required to preserve all government-related emails conducted on their private accounts under the Federal Records Act. The fact that NARA has such a large collection suggests Biden gave those emails to the nation’s history-preserving agency.

The total revealed by the Archives dwarfs the original tally from the most infamous private email scandal in American history involving former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, which also involved government business on Obama’s watch.

A State Department inspector general report in summer 2016 found Mrs. Clinton improperly used a secret private email server stored in a bathroom closet in her family’s home in Chappaqua, N.Y., to regularly conduct government business and later deleted many of the emails she considered to be private.

“Secretary Clinton produced to the Department from her personal email account approximately 55,000 hard-copy pages, representing approximately 30,000 emails that she believed related to official business,” the final report noted. Those totals are significantly smaller than the amount of pages the National Archives says it has from Biden’s personal account.