Neither the White House nor the Secret Service maintain visitor logs for President Biden’s personal residence in Wilmington, Delaware. They’re making the disclosure because the House Oversight Committee put in an official request with White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain for all logs going back to Jan. 20, 2021, the day President Biden took office.
“Like every president in decades of modern history, his personal residence is personal,” the White House counsel’s office said in a statement obtained by Fox. “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.”
A Secret Service spokesman said the agency does screen visitors but does not maintain a record of who they checked.
“We don’t independently maintain our own visitor logs because it’s a private residence,” Spokesman Anthony Guglielmi told reporters.
The Secret Service said the same for former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home when classified documents were found there.
In his letter to Klain, Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., wrote it is “troubling” that classified information has been stored at the Biden home.
“President Biden’s mishandling of classified materials raises the issue of whether he has jeopardized our national security. Without a list of individuals who have visited his residence, the American people will never know who had access to these highly sensitive documents,” Comer wrote.
Comer also requested all documents and communications by Biden aides that are related to the case.
“Because this is the same type of investigation that the Democrats were so outraged and launched and demanded happen to President Trump. What we see with President Biden is there are multiple locations. We would never have known about the possession of the classified documents were it not for investigative reporting by CBS,” Comer said on CNN’s State of the Union.
Democrats contend President Biden’s team has handled the situation well and returned the documents the day they were discovered.
“That is a very different posture than what we saw with Donald Trump, where he was fighting for a period of more than 8 months to not turn over hundreds of missing documents that the Archives was asking about,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said on State of the Union. “I think every American has an interest in seeing that classified documents are properly handled by whoever is president and by any administration. And all we’re looking for is equal treatment.”
A growing list of congressional Democrats have spoken out, saying this is a serious matter and needs to be thoroughly investigated. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel on Thursday.
The AP contributed to this report.