Rabia İclal Turan
17 January 2023•Update: 17 January 2023
WASHINGTON
The White House said Monday that no visitor logs exist for President Joe Biden’s personal residence in Wilmington, Delaware, where classified documents were recently found.
“Like every President across decades of modern history, his personal residence is personal,” White House counsel’s office spokesman Ian Sams said in a statement to several media outlets.
“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.”
The statement came a day after a top Republican, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, sent a letter to the White House asking for the release of visitors logs from Biden’s home in Delaware.
“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 said in the letter.
In a separate statement, Sams slammed US House Republicans, saying they have “no credibility.”
“Their demands should be met with skepticism and they should face questions themselves about why they are politicizing this issue and admitting they actually do not care about the underlying classified material,” he added.
The White House announced Saturday that five more classified documents were found at Biden's home in the northeastern state of Delaware.
This was in addition to the documents found on Dec. 20 in Biden’s garage in Wilmington, Delaware, and on Nov. 2 at his former offices at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., from the Obama-Biden administration.
The documents reportedly included US intelligence memos and briefing materials dated between 2013 and 2016 related to Ukraine, Iran and the UK.
Biden said he was surprised to learn that the classified documents from his time as vice president were found at the office of his think tank, adding his team “immediately” handed them to the National Archives.
US Attorney General Merrick Garland announced last week the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the issue of the classified documents found at addresses linked to Biden.
Although the first batch of documents were discovered on Nov. 2, six days before crucial midterm elections, the issue was not disclosed to the public until CBS News first reported about it on Jan. 9.
The White House has come under increasing pressure from both Congressional Republicans and the US media for not disclosing it before the elections.
Republicans have also drawn parallels between Biden and the controversy over former President Donald Trump holding onto classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort residence.
Democrats have countered that Trump held onto hundreds of documents, not the handful found so far found at Biden’s addresses, and Biden immediately turned over the documents to the government, while Trump refused to hand them over.
