World

No visitor logs for Biden's home: White House

January 17, 2023 11:37 am

President Joe Biden. [Source: BBC News]

The White House has said that there are no visitor logs available for President Joe Biden’s private home.

Republicans have demanded to see the logs of his Delaware home after classified files were discovered there.

On Monday, the White House counsel’s office said that it is not standard practice to keep tabs on who visits the private homes of presidents.

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At least 20 documents have been found at Mr Biden’s home and at an office, he used in Washington.

The documents date from his time as vice president under the Obama administration. Some of them were marked “Top Secret” – the highest level of classification – CBS News has reported.

News that sensitive documents had been found in a private office at the Penn Biden Center, a think tank in Washington, emerged earlier this month. That was followed by a disclosure that a second cache was discovered at Mr Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware home.

The White House said over the weekend that an additional five pages of classified material were discovered on Thursday. By law, all White House files should be handed over to the National Archives at the end of a presidency.

The White House has said the files were “inadvertently misplaced” and that it is cooperating fully.

Congressional Republicans have been calling for the White House to release visitor logs of Mr Biden’s homes, but the White House had until Monday refused to say if such information will be divulged.

But in a statement on Monday, the White House counsel’s office said that no such visitor logs exist.

The Secret Service has previously said it does not maintain logs of presidential private residences. In 2017, it said in a court filing that no visitor logs were kept at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, where hundreds of classified files were found last year by the FBI.

However, the agency does have a permanent presence at Mr Biden’s homes in Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach and screens visitors before they enter.

A special counsel is investigating Mr Biden’s handling of the files. The Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee has said it would launch its own investigation.

The White House does publicly release a visitor log on its website – a practice brought in during the Obama administration.

It was paused during the Trump presidency and reinstated when Mr Biden took office.