The White House attorney’s office said Monday that no visitor logs are being kept at President Joe Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, residence, thwarting a Republican effort to find out who might have visited the home while classified documents were stored there.
On Sunday, Rep. James Comer, the new chairman of the House Oversight Committee, asked in a letter to Ron Klain, Biden’s White House chief of staff, for information about the office searches of the documents. Biden at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington and at Biden’s home, including lists of those who have visited the residence since he became president nearly two years ago.
“Like all presidents throughout the decades of modern history, his personal residence is a personal one,” the attorney’s office said in a statement. “But upon taking office, President Biden restored the norm and tradition of keeping White House visitor logs, including periodicals, after they were terminated by the previous administration.”
The Secret Service also said that while a security team is assigned to the home, it does not track who comes in and who goes out.
“We do not independently maintain our own visitor logs because it is a private residence,” a Secret Service spokesperson said.
Newly empowered House Republicans have been demanding more information about who might have had access to classified documents from Biden’s vice presidency that ended in 2017 and that were discovered in his Washington think tank where he worked occasionally and at his home. from Delaware.
Biden has said he was surprised that classified documents, some 20 in total, were found in places linked to him.
Attorney General Merrick Garland, the top law enforcement official, appointed two special counsel, one to investigate how Biden and his aides handled classified documents when he left the vice presidency and another to investigate how the former president Donald Trump took more than 300 classified documents with him to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida seaside retreat, when his presidency ended two years ago.
Biden has turned over the documents recovered at locations tied to him to the National Archives and Records Administration, as required by law. In both cases, the Trump and Biden documents should have been turned over when their terms ended.
Meanwhile, Trump, at the request of the National Archives, returned some documents months after leaving office, but when officials came to believe he still had more classified materials at Mar-a-Lago, they obtained court approval to search. the property. in August and recovered dozens of other documents.
Eating Sunday’s request for visitor logs came a day after the White House said Biden aides had found five additional pages of classified material at his home, on top of an earlier disclosure that others had been found. documents in the garage of the residence and in the Washington office that Biden used occasionally before running for president in 2020.
Republicans, who regained tight control of the House of Representatives in November’s nationwide midterm elections, criticized Biden for not acknowledging the existence of his classified vice presidential documents until last week, despite the fact that the cache in his office was discovered in early November, just days before the election.
In an interview on ‘s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Comer said he was not accusing Biden of wrongdoing, but added: “I am going to accuse the Biden administration of not being transparent” by not confirming. that the classified documents had not been discovered until after CBS News first reported it.
“The hypocrisy here is great,” Comer said of Biden attacking Trump for his cache of documents and then not confirming his until weeks after the election, the disclosure of which could have influenced the vote.
The White House, which is seeking to minimize the political fallout from the release of classified material found at Biden’s locations, has signaled that it is cooperating fully with the investigation of his documents, while Trump has criticized the investigation of the material found at Mar-a – Lake.
Connect with the Voice of America! Subscribe to our channel Youtube and activate notifications, or follow us on social networks: Facebook, Twitter and instagram.
