House Republicans are demanding to know who visited President Biden’s Wilmington, Del., home over the roughly five-year period in which classified documents were sitting in the garage — but no records detailing comings and goings at the property exist, according to the White House counsel’s office.
Representative James Comer (R., Ky.), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, sent a letter to White House chief of staff Ron Klain on Sunday demanding visitor logs for Biden’s private residence in light of the news that a trove of Obama administration classified documents were discovered in the garage.
“Given the serious national security implications, the White House must provide the Wilmington residence’s visitor log,” Comer argued. “Without a list of individuals who have visited his residence, the American people will never know who had access to these highly sensitive documents.”
The Secret Service confirmed that despite posting a security detail to the Delaware residence, no visitor records are. “We don’t independently maintain our own visitor logs because it’s a private residence,” agency spokesman Anthony Guglielmi told Fox.
The White House counsel’s office pushed back on Comer’s request in a Monday statement, pointing out that it’s not standard practice to keep visitor logs for private residences.
“Like every President in decades of modern history, his personal residence is personal,” the White House Counsel’s office said in a statement to Fox News. “But upon taking office, President Biden restored the norm and tradition of keeping White House visitors logs, including publishing them regularly, after the previous administration ended them.”
While it’s unclear who may have visited Biden’s home after his time in the Obama administration, his troubled son Hunter was living at the house at the time, the Washington Free Beacon reported last week.
Comer’s announcement comes just days after Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Robert Hur as special counsel to investigate Biden for potentially mishandling classified documents while vice-president.
“The extraordinary circumstances here require the appointment of a special counsel for this matter,” Garland said during a press conference Thursday.
However, the news did not appear to assuage the concerns of senior Republicans such as Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) who criticized the Department of Justice’s handling of the matter.
“They knew this happened to President Biden before the election, but they kept it secret from the American public,” McCarthy told a scrum of reporters on Capitol Hill.
Biden’s attorneys discovered classified documents in the president’s former office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C. days before the midterms. Weeks later, on December 20, Biden’s personal attorney notified the White House that additional documents had been found in the garage of his Wilmington home. But the White House didn’t reveal either of those discoveries until January 9.
Some of the documents found at Biden’s former office were marked top secret, sources familiar with the matter told the Washington Post.
Over the weekend, White House lawyers announced the discovery of six more pages of classified documents at the Wilmington residence.
According to the Presidential Records Act, all presidential and vice-presidential records must be transferred to the National Archives at the end of an administration.
However, Comer stopped short of demanding a similar visitor log for Trump’s Florida residence of Mar-a-Lago despite an ongoing similar investigation.
“I don’t feel like we need to spend a whole lot of time because the Democrats have done that for the past six years,” Comer told CNN Sunday.
The announcement of a special counsel to investigate Biden unfolded against the backdrop of former president Donald Trump’s ongoing legal battles over his taking classified documents to Mar a Lago after leaving the White House, and refusing to return them when the National Archives requested it. Garland appointed Jack Smith, a former DOJ prosecutor, to investigate the matter in November 2022.