The United States Secret Service recently claimed that it has “no records” of anyone who visits Joe Biden while he is at one of his two homes in Delaware, thus rendering such information impossible to obtain via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
As reported by the New York Post, although Biden spent one-fourth of his first year in office in Delaware, in either his Wilmington or Rehoboth Beach houses, no information can be retrieved about anyone who met with him there for official business, such as administration business or lobbying, as well as family members or friends.
“[T]he Secret Service FOIA Office searched all Program Offices that were likely to contain potentially responsive records,” the agency said in response to a FOIA request by the Post. “And no records were located.”
Biden is known to have conducted official business from his Delaware homes during some of the 99 days he spent there in 2021. For example, on October 24th, 2021, Biden hosted Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) discussed ways to convince Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.V.), one of the moderate Democrats in the Senate, to support Biden’s signature spending bill, known as Build Back Better.
Biden himself also said that a family friend visited them in January of this year to tell them about the reality of inflation, which is at a 40-year high under Biden.
“I was sitting in my kitchen yesterday and here’s a sunroom off the kitchen and my wife was there with her sister and a good friend named Mary Ann,” Biden recalled recently. “And she was saying, ‘Do you realize it’s over $5 for a pound of hamburger meat? $5?’”
In response to the Secret Service statement about the lack of information, Tom Fitton, president of the watchdog group Judicial Watch, accused the agency of playing a “shell game,” where the visitor logs in question might be in the possession of the White House rather than the Secret Service.
“Obviously the Secret Service knows and tracks who is visiting President Biden at his homes in Delaware,” Fitton stated. “And they are playing a shell game with the public to keep that information secret.”
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki defended the administration’s secrecy and lack of transparency, claiming that “the president goes to Delaware because it’s his home. It’s also where his son and his former wife are buried. And it’s a place that is obviously close to his heart. A lot of presidents go visit their home when they are president.”
Psaki also falsely claimed that the Biden Administration had “gone a step further than the prior administration in many administrations in releasing visitor logs of people who visit the White House.”