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The National Archives wants to release hundreds of pages of emails about Hunter Biden and Burisma — and the White House won't say whether it will let it happen
Mattathias Schwartz | Business Insider
Wed, December 14, 2022 at 10:38 AM

National Archives is set to release White House emails about Burisma, the Ukrainian company that reportedly paid Hunter Biden $1.5 million.

The emails are from 2014, when President Joe Biden served as vice president under former President Barack Obama.

The White House now has 60 days to decide whether to stop the release of the emails by invoking executive privilege.

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is quietly preparing to release hundreds of pages of internal Obama White House records that could contain information about Hunter Biden's relationship with Ukrainian energy company Burisma, Insider has learned — and the Biden Administration, which could put a stop to it by invoking executive privilege, is refusing to say whether it will allow the release to go forward.

The records, which include almost 300 full or partial emails that mention Burisma, date back to 2014, when Joe Biden was serving as vice president in the Obama Administration. According to a letter that the archives sent to the Biden White House and the Obama Foundation in November, NARA is proposing to release the records in response to a Freedom of Information Act request for emails that contain the word "Burisma."

The letter doesn't describe the emails, but says that "several" of them are press inquiries after the 2014 announcement that Hunter Biden had joined the company's board, earning as much as $83,333 a month despite having no experience in the energy sector. The letter also says NARA will withhold 22 emails, without specifying why. The Freedom of Information Act offers exemptions for draft documents and comments that are "part of the deliberative or policy-making process." Documents that could violate someone's privacy or expose trade secrets are also potentially exempt.

If released, the emails could shed light on the long-standing — and so far unsubstantiated — claims from right-wing political critics that Burisma used Hunter to corruptly influence U.S. foreign policy.

But first, the Biden White House must make a politically fraught decision about whether to invoke executive privilege to keep the emails secret. Under the Presidential Records Act, Biden and Obama's respective legal teams have 60 days to assert claims of privilege before the Burisma emails will be released. If they choose to do so, the emails will remain sealed until January 2029, unless a court orders otherwise.

Mark Zaid, a national-security lawyer who has represented many federal whistleblowers, said the case for executive privilege was weak on legal grounds for those documents that are already in third-party hands, and invocation for any document carried political risks as well. "Any selective invocation of privilege," he said "would no doubt only serve to highlight the sensitivities."

The Biden White House repeatedly declined to answer questions about whether it intended to fight release.

The National Archives told Insider that the original FOIA request was filed by a lawyer for America First Legal, a nonprofit founded by Stephen Miller, the Trump advisor and hardline proponent of anti-immigrant policies. America First Legal has gained recent prominence for broad legal efforts to fight what it calls "anti-white bigotry."

The attempt by a Trump-affiliated group to get records from a prior administration out of the National Archives is somewhat ironic: After he lost re-election, Trump tried to use executive privilege to keep the archives from releasing records from his administration to the committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Biden rejected that attempt and Trump lost in court.

America First Legal and the Obama Foundation did not respond to requests for comment.

In late 2015, Biden pressured the Ukrainian prime minister to fire prosecutor-general Viktor Shokin, whose office had at one point been looking into Burisma and its owner, Mykola Zlochevskiy. But Shokin's deputy has said that the investigation was shelved months before Shokin's dismissal, and Shokin remained at his post until March 2016, long after Biden had left.

To date, the longstanding GOP narrative that the VP used his diplomatic muscle to help Burisma get rid of an unfriendly prosecutor appears unsupported by the existing chronology, no matter what the emails from Biden's vice presidential office might turn up. What the emails could shed light on is Joe Biden's longstanding claim not to discuss client matters with Hunter, or to have gotten involved with his business. Exactly how that informal understanding worked in practice, and what the limits were, remains unclear.

According to Reuters, Hunter Biden's company received monthly payments of $83,333 for 18 months while he was on Burisma's board, a total of $1.5 million. Burisma appears to have paid an additional $1.5 million to a business associate of Hunter Biden's, Devon Archer, who was also on the company's board.

The Burisma emails are, of course, only one of the many ongoing Hunter Biden controversies. The Justice Department has an open criminal investigation, which is reportedly focusing on foreign lobbying and tax matters. House Republicans have promised to launch their own far-reaching inquiry into Hunter Biden's finances and tumultuous personal life, and some of Hunter Biden's allies are discussing ways to counter-attack. And the recent disclosure of what appear to be internal corporate emails from Twitter have put new scrutiny on the company's decision to censor posts about Hunter Biden's laptop immediately before the 2020 election. Biden's supporters raised concerns at the time that the material from the laptop could be fabricated, or that it was Russian disinformation. Neither of those claims have been substantiated.

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