President Biden used his home in Wilmington, Delaware as the White House over the weekend, making 52 trips there since taking office in January 2021 and spending all or part of 164 days at the residence, according to The Post.
The White House initially defended Biden’s frequent trips home against claims he was taking time off, with then-press secretary Jen Psaki telling reporters last February that the president could “work from anywhere.”
However, after the scandal over Biden’s handling of classified documents broke, the administration changed its stance — saying the Wilmington residence was “personal” and not a government post, in an effort to avoid releasing records of who visited.
Meanwhile, the Secret Service said this week that it does not keep logs of visitors to the “private residence,” going beyond its responses to two previous requests from The Post for information about visitors to Biden’s Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach homes.
President Biden has visited his Delaware home 52 times since January 2021. AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta The Secret Service says it does not keep visitor logs at the house where classified documents are kept. WPVI
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The White House said the Wilmington residence is “personal” for Biden. AP Photo/Andrew Harnick
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Biden has spent all or part of 164 days at his home in Delaware since taking office.
In April, the agency said “no records were found” in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. In late September, the Secret Service denied the FOIA appeal, again telling The Post that “no responsive records were found” after “further searching the appropriate program offices.”
On Oct. 10, The Post filed a more broadly worded FOIA request, asking the Secret Service to “[e]letters that relate to visitors to President Biden’s residences” during his administration. The agency acknowledged the request, but has not yet provided a substantive response.
It’s unclear whether there really isn’t a centralized record of who visits Biden in Delaware. The Secret Service may be playing word games by technically believing the records belong to the White House even though the defense agency maintains them, creating what transparency advocates call a “shell game.”
Don’t believe that the Secret Service doesn’t know who visits the Biden house — it’s Congress’ job to find out
By Andrew S. McCarthy
Let’s say the FBI is investigating a threat against the president, and a proper line of inquiry involves finding out who visited the president’s private homes in Delaware on specific dates during the past 23 months. The Secret Service is responsible for guarding these private residences, even when the president is not on site. If the FBI tells the Secret Service that it’s extremely important to get this kind of visitor information, do you really think the Secret Service is going to say, “God, I’m sorry, we don’t keep logs of that”?
I definitely don’t believe that.
Given the lawyerly way the Biden White House has responded to questions about who visited the president at his Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach homes, I’m willing to believe the Secret Service doesn’t keep a document they call a “diary.” to the visitors. But I don’t believe the Secret Service lacks visitor information records, whatever they call those records. I’m very confident that if the agency believed it was in the president’s security interest to have the information produced for the bureau, it would have been produced with great speed.
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