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White House might be exempt, but DOD can't fool with a FOIA

White House might be exempt, but DOD can't fool with a FOIA


White House might be exempt, but DOD can't fool with a FOIA

A conservative legal organization reports it may have found a chink in the armor surrounding possible influence peddling and the President of the United States.

President Joe Biden is being accused of colluding with his son Hunter and foreign entities for personal gain. The claim is that the president is using emails with pseudonyms to hide the scheme. But America First Legal (AFL) thinks Biden might have blundered by using an email domain that is stored on a server run by the Defense Information Service Agency.

AFL attorney Michael Ding explains that a president is usually exempt from having to provide documents via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. "FOIA only applies to certain agencies, of which the White House is usually not considered an agency under FOIA," he tells AFN.

But the Defense Information Service Agency, he points out, must comply with such requests. In this case, it pertains to Biden's pseudonym/email address robert.l.peters@pci.gov.

"Because it's now pretty well established that Joe Biden used this 'pci.gov' e-mail alias, we're seeing if that opens up an angle of attack through a FOIA submitted to the Department of Defense," says the attorney. "We're trying to see [via this request] whether we can obtain White House records using these e-mail domains through FOIA because they're being hosted on Defense Department servers."

While Ding isn't sure what America First Legal will find, widely reported accusations include everything from illicit gain to influence peddling. But he says the presidential records are well-guarded.

"Since this administration is doing everything it can to conceal these type of records from the American public, it seems like we're all taking a very broad approach and attacking this issue from a variety of different angles," says Ding.

America First Legal contends evidence shows Joe Biden used his office "for influence peddling on an industrial scale" – and can no longer be denied or covered up.