Hunter’s buddy sent Joe docs to archives

A close friend of Hunter Biden — who got a job as then-Vice President Joe Biden’s legal counsel — was at “the center of various discussions” relating to the president’s handling of classified documents, the White House acknowledged.

In 2016, John McGrail was Biden’s main legal adviser on how classified materials from his vice presidency should be managed once he left office, according to a joint letter from White House special counsel Richard Sauber and Bob Bauer, the president’s personal counsel, to special counsel Robert Hur.

McGrail (above, right) landed his job as deputy counsel and later counsel to Veep Biden in 2014, just weeks after Hunter Biden personally lobbied his father to give his friend the job, according to emails found on

Hunter’s abandoned laptop.

“Before you fill position pls talk to me — J. McGrail very much wants to serve,” Hunter (above, left) wrote to “Robin Ware,” one of his father’s email pseudonyms.

“Re Johnny call me right away,” Biden responded.

The connection was disconcerting, said Jim Hanson, an information strategy expert who has studied the laptop messages.

“At the same time when Hunter is raking in satchels of cash from the Chinese, these classified documents are showing up at the house where he’s partying with hookers and doing blow,” Hanson said. “And it happens to be his good buddy from back in the day who is transporting the documents.”

Sauber and Bauer’s letter attempted to rebut Hur’s explosive characterization of the president as an “elderly man with a poor memory.”

But it also spotlighted the central role of McGrail, a longtime Hunter Biden chum who, emails show, joined him in yoga and in jokes about “hot staffers,” and who, in 2016, hosted Eric Schwerin, Hunter’s business partner, in two White House meetings.

McGrail told Hur’s investigators that in the final days of the Obama administration in January 2017, he oversaw the transportation of Biden’s classified papers to storage in the National Archives. “It was just, ‘Your records are going to the Archives,’” McGrail testified. “That was it.”

He claimed to have no knowledge of how so much classified material — including notebooks, diaries, note cards and memos — came to be squirreled away in his boss’ Wilmington, Del., home and garage.

McGrail returned to the Department of the Treasury, and in 2022 went to work for the EPA.