Well, I’ll Be Darned — Turns Out Secret Service Does Have Records of Visitors to Biden’s Private Homes

Last week, the Biden White House claimed that the Secret Service would not be able to provide the identities of visitors to the president’s private homes in Delaware — i.e., in Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach — because the agency does not maintain visitors logs. In a New York Post column headlined “Don’t believe for a moment the Secret Service doesn’t know who visits Biden’s house — it’s Congress’s job to find out,” I expressed skepticism:

Let’s say the FBI was investigating a threat against the president, and one relevant line of inquiry involved figuring out who had visited the president’s private homes in Delaware during certain dates over the last 23 months. The Secret Service is responsible for keeping these private residences secure even when the president is not on site. If the FBI told the Secret Service that it was critical to get such visitor information, do you really think the Secret Service would respond, “Gee, sorry, we don’t keep logs for that”?

I certainly don’t believe that.

Given the lawyerly way the Biden White House has answered questions about who has visited the president at his Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach homes, I am prepared to believe that the Secret Service does not keep a document that they call a “log” of visitors. But I do not believe the Secret Service lacks records of visitor information, whatever they may call those records. I am very confident that, if the agency believed it was in the interests of the president’s security that the information be produced for the bureau, it would be produced at warp speed.

Well, I’ll be darned: Fox News is now reporting that, on second thought, it turns out that the Secret Service does keep records of who visits the president at his private homes, and that it is prepared to turn over the information if requested to do so by Congress. The agency’s spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi, explains that while a document called a “visitors log” is not kept, “Secret Service does generate law enforcement and criminal justice information records for various individuals who may come into contact with Secret Service protected sites,” such as the president’s residences.

Who’d have thought!