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WASHINGTON — The US Secret Service is reiterating its claim that it does not maintain visitor logs for President Biden’s Delaware properties, as House Republicans demand data that could disclose who accessed unlawfully held classified materials at his Wilmington house.
Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi told FoxNews.com, “Because it is a private residence, we do not independently maintain our own visitor logs.”
A representative for the White House counsel’s office told the publication, “His personal residence is private, as it has been for every president in the last several decades.”
Last year, the Secret Service asserted to The Post that it does not maintain visitor records for Biden’s Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach properties.
The agency stated in April and late September that no records were located in response to Freedom of Information Act requests and appeals, respectively.
The Post later filed a broader Freedom of Information Act request with the Secret Service on October 10, requesting “emails that refer to visitors to President Biden’s residences” during his term in office. The agency acknowledged receipt of the request but has not yet supplied a formal response.
After sensitive materials were discovered in the driveway of President Biden’s Wilmington home on January 15, Secret Service agents parked vehicles there.
It is unclear if there is no centralized record of who visits Biden in Delaware, where he has spent about a quarter of his time as president. A computer system known as WAVES (Worker and Visitor Entry System) maintains track of everyone visits the White House.
It is likely that the Secret Service is playing word games by formally classifying the White House documents as belonging to the White House, despite the fact that the protection agency maintains them, producing what transparency advocates refer to as a “shell game.”
Even if the agency does not maintain records, analysts believe the Secret Service has at least some record of who visits the president.
Tom Fitton, president of the conservative transparency group Judicial Watch, told The Post in October, “If the Secret Service is doing its job, visitor records must exist.” If there are no records, the issue is considerably more serious than a mere lack of transparency.
Transparency groups have fought for presidential visitor logs with varying degrees of success, suffering severe setbacks at the hands of federal appellate courts in Washington and New York.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) successfully sued to obtain records of visits to former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, but only obtained a 22-name list of a Japanese delegation’s guests in 2017.
CREW spokesperson Jordan Libowitz told The Post in April, when the Secret Service first claimed to have no Delaware logs, “While we won access to those records, we never got much because the Secret Service came out and said they were not vetting the president’s meetings; the Trump Organization was,” when the Secret Service first claimed to have no Delaware logs.
Biden, unlike Trump, does not have a major corporation screening his visits and providing its own security processes.
Email logs can provide a more complete picture of events involving the Secret Service than visitation tables. In 2021, for instance, internal documents disclosed through FOIA lawsuit revealed a peculiar cover-up of dog-bite occurrences involving the presidential German shepherd, Major Biden.
Although former White House press secretary Jen Psaki disclosed only one dog attack on March 9, 2021, Secret Service emails revealed that Major had just bitten agents for eight consecutive days from March 1-8 and a White House visitor, after biting the thighs, arms, and buttocks of two agents in Wilmington on February 28.
As vice president and in the years that followed, Joe Biden frequently met with his son Hunter’s and brother James’ international business contacts, representing China, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Russia, and Ukraine, thereby increasing interest in the senior Biden’s Delaware visitors.
»Secret Service and White House argue there is no public trace of Biden’s visits to Delaware«