WASHINGTON — The Secret Service said Monday it does not track who comes and goes from President Biden’s Delaware residence where classified documents were improperly stored — despite the 80-year-old commander-in-chief using the home as a weekend White House.
Since taking office in January 2021, Biden has made 52 trips to the Wilmington house, spending all or part of 164 days there, according to a tally by The Post.
Despite the frequency of the president’s trips home, Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi told FoxNews.com that “we don’t independently maintain our own visitor logs because it’s a private residence.”
A spokesman for the White House counsel’s office added to the outlet, “Like every president in decades of modern history, his personal residence is personal.”
Secret Service personnel park vehicles in the driveway to President Biden’s Wilmington house Jan. 15 after classified documents were found there. REUTERSGuglielmi’s statement goes beyond two previous claims made by the Secret Service last year to The Post in response to records requests for visitor information at Biden’s Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach homes.
In April, the agency said “no records were located” in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. In late September, the Secret Service denied a FOIA appeal, telling The Post again that “no responsive records” were found after an “additional search of relevant program offices.”
The Post subsequently filed on Oct. 10 a more broadly worded FOIA request asking the Secret Service for “[e]mails that refer to visitors to President Biden’s residences” during his time in office. The agency acknowledged the request but has not yet provided a substantive reply.
Biden stored classified records apparently from his vice presidency at his Delaware home. Google EarthIt’s unclear if there truly is no centralized record of who visits Biden in Wilmington, where he’s been nearly one-fourth of his days since taking office. At the White House complex itself, a computer system known as WAVES (Worker and Visitor Entry System) keeps tabs on visits.
It’s possible that the Secret Service is playing word games by technically deeming the records to belong to the White House even though the protective agency maintains them, creating what transparency advocates call a “shell game.”
If the agency truly doesn’t keep a visitor log, experts say the Secret Service likely has at least some written record of who visits the president.
The latest on President Biden’s classified docs scandal
“If the Secret Service is doing its job, there has to be visitor records,” Tom Fitton, president of conservative transparency group Judicial Watch, told The Post in October. “If there aren’t any records, the scandal is much bigger than just a lack of transparency.”
Transparency groups have fought for presidential visitor logs with mixed success, incurring notable defeats in federal appeals courts based in Washington and New York.
In 2013, Biden’s now-Attorney General Merrick Garland wrote for a three-judge DC Circuit Court of Appeals panel that a president’s constitutional right to confidential communications means that the Freedom of Information Act doesn’t apply to visitor logs kept by the Secret Service — even though they would seem to meet the definition of “agency records” under FOIA.
Joe Biden steps off Marine One upon arrival on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC on January 16, 2023. AFP via Getty ImagesFormer President Donald Trump drew the ire of transparency advocates by refusing to release White House visitor logs pursuant to Garland’s ruling. Biden partially revived the releases while withholding “records that implicate privacy, national security, or other concerns.”
In a case dealing with a president’s personal residence, the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) successfully sued to obtain records of visitors to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, but walked away with little more than a 22-name list of a 2017 Japanese delegation.
“While we won access to those records, we never got much, as the Secret Service came out and said they were not vetting the president’s meetings, the Trump Organization was,” CREW spokesperson Jordan Libowitz told The Post in April, when the Secret Service first claimed to have no Delaware logs.
Biden admitted Thursday that some classified documents were stored near his Corvette. Joe BidenUnlike Trump, Biden doesn’t have a business entity vetting his visitors and providing its own security processes.
Email records ultimately could provide an even more detailed snapshot of events involving the Secret Service than tables of visitors. For example, internal communications revealed via FOIA litigation in 2021 exposed a bizarre cover-up of dog-bite incidents involving presidential German shepherd Major Biden.
Although then-White House press secretary Jen Psaki disclosed just one dog attack on March 9, 2021, Secret Service emails revealed that Major had just bitten agents for eight days in a row from March 1 to 8 as well as a White House visitor — after biting the thigh, arm and buttocks of two agents in Wilmington on Feb. 28.
As vice president and in the years that followed, Joe Biden regularly interacted with his son Hunter and brother James’ international business associates — representing interests in China, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Russia and Ukraine — heightening interest in the elder Biden’s Delaware guests.






