(Headline USA) Former Secretary of State John Kerry used a pseudonymous email account while working for the Obama administration, just like former Vice President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, according to a new whistleblower report.
Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., revealed that Kerry frequently used the private email alias “[email protected]” in violation of federal record-keeping laws, as well as likely circumventing Freedom of Information Act requests.
One example cited by the whistleblower was a 2016 email exchange between the address and Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, which showed Nuland calling the recipient “Boss.”
Kerry’s tenure at the State Department notably overlapped with Hunter Biden’s stint as a board member of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma—a matter that Grassley and Johnson previously investigated. The probe also implicated Kerry’s own stepson, Chris Heinz, a partner of Hunter’s in the Rosemont Seneca lawfirm.
It was not immediately clear if the recent bombshell came in connection with the GOP senators’ oversight concerning the Burisma scandal, although prior analyses of Hunter Biden’s laptop revealed Joe Biden’s use of multiple fake email aliases, including “Robin Ware,” which he used to secretly monitor the exchanges with his son’s business partners.
In a letter to current Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Grassley and Johnson asked the department to confirm whether Kerry “properly complied with all federal records laws and regulations with respect to his official email communications.”
They also noted that the use of private emails and pseudonyms appeared to be a frequent pattern of behavior in the Obama administration. In addition to Biden and Kerry, Clinton notoriously rerouted her email to private, unsecured server that she maintained possession of at her home.
The server, which revealed several emails with classified markings, despite Clinton’s efforts to destroy the evidence, was believed to have been compromised by the Chinese.
The collective disregard by these top officials for federal recordkeeping law undermines former President Barack Obama’s claim that his administration had been completely scandal-free, while it also offers some explanation for how the administration was create the illusion of good government through its unprecedented dishonesty.
“We didn’t have a scandal that embarrassed us,” Obama said in 2018 according to CNN. “I know that seems like a low bar. General speaking, you didn’t hear about a lot of drama inside our White House.”
As the whistleblower’s latest revelations suggest, much of the Obama administration’s internal drama was likely hidden from public scrutiny, and the shockingly brazen efforts to conceal information from the public have themselves become one of the biggest scandals.
Nonetheless, several controversies did spill out into the public, as when four Americans were killed in Benghazi, Libya, due to Clinton’s “systematic failures and leadership and management deficiencies,” according to an independent accountability board.
