CNN
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The White House counsel’s office says there are no visitor logs that track visitors to and from President Joe Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware.
House Republicans have been demanding that the White House turn over all information about leaked documents from Biden’s time as vice president, including any visitors who entered Biden’s home and who might have entered his office in Washington, DC, where the original documents were found. in early November.
“Like every president in recent decades, his residence is private,” the counsel’s office said in a statement Monday morning. “But after taking office, President Biden resumed the practice of keeping guest logs at the White House, including publishing them regularly, after the previous administration was gone.”
Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesman for the US Secret Service, also said the agency does not independently keep logs of visitors to Biden’s home in Wilmington. The agency provides security at the site, screening visitors before they arrive at the Biden residence, but does not keep records of those visitors. Biden and his staff decide who is allowed into the building.
Guglielmi said the Secret Service does not keep private records of visitors to the Wilmington home because it is a “private residence.”
Saturday’s announcement was the third time in less than a week that the White House has been forced to admit dozens of documents from Biden’s time as vice president were found at his residence — first at an office in Washington, DC, and later at a home in Wilmington.
CNN previously reported that information found in Biden’s business office included top secret files containing “classified information”, which is used for highly classified information obtained from intelligence sources. The documents also included US intelligence memos and briefing materials that covered topics in Ukraine, Iran and the United Kingdom, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The White House announced over the weekend that it had found five more pages of classified documents at Biden’s home in Wilmington on Thursday. The White House counsel’s office said it would refer all future questions to the office of the special counsel.
In a letter to White House chief of staff Ron Klain, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, Republican of Kentucky, requested more documents and communications related to the search of Biden’s residence and other locations by the President’s aides. to access confidential documents, as well. as guests entering the President’s residence Wilmington from January 20, 2021 until now.
“It is troubling that classified documents have been improperly stored in President Biden’s home for at least six years, raising questions about who reviewed or knew the information,” Comer wrote in the letter. “As Chief of Staff, you are the head of the Office of the President and you have the responsibility to speak clearly to the American people on these important issues related to how the White House is handling this issue.”
The White House called the Republican investigation “shameless fraud” compared to former President Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago in his post-White House years.
“Republicans at home have no credibility. Their demands should be treated with suspicion and they should ask themselves why they are politicizing this issue and admit they don’t care about what’s in this group,” said White House spokesman Ian Sams.
Another search of other sites connected to Biden may be conducted on the president’s record and any items from his time as vice president that must be returned to the federal government, multiple sources familiar with the matter told CNN.
Mr. Biden’s team has searched his private office in Washington, DC, and his two Delaware homes — three places where the White House said files may have been sent during his 2017 departure — and produced about 20 documents.
Sources say more manhunts are possible, but it’s unclear who might be conducting them or where they might be conducted. Although sources did not provide other possible locations, Mr. Biden used other offices, and his family rented a house in northern Virginia.
Meanwhile, Biden’s personal attorneys and White House special counsel Richard Sauber, who has a security clearance, have conducted the search. Justice Department officials also accompanied Sauber last week to retrieve five more pages of documents found at the Wilmington home after the initial search.
But the search for Mr. Biden’s team came as a surprise to the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago, which also looked into the matter, a source close to the investigation told CNN.
John Lausch, the US attorney there, was arrested by Attorney General Merrick Garland less than two weeks after Biden’s lawyers obtained the first documents. Lausch did not request an additional site search after it was found, according to the source, nor did he search the site himself or use a large yard in his inspection. Instead, Biden’s lawyers chose to search Biden’s homes in Delaware themselves, the source said.
After the process took several weeks, Lausch did not wait for Biden’s team to complete their search of his Delaware residence before announcing that Garland would appoint a special counsel to investigate. Lausch briefed the attorney general several times before officially appointing the special counsel on Jan. 5. Garland appointed Robert Hur to the position last week.
Most of the recent information was released by the Department of Justice. Sources tell CNN that Justice officials decided to release the information after the White House released information in dribs and drabs, causing confusion and mistrust.
While some Republicans are crying foul, they say that Trump was treated differently because FBI agents raided Mar-a-Lago last August, which followed months of Trump’s team throwing rocks and failing to turn over documents the National Archives wanted.
In addition, the Trump investigation is looking for possible tampering, in part because after the former president’s lawyers confirmed that all the documents had been returned, investigators found evidence that they were not and a video of the boxes being removed from the storage room. Trump’s team promised to protect it.
Since then, Trump’s legal team has hired people to search Trump properties, including Trump Tower in New York and his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey.
This article has been updated with additional reporting.
