President Joe Biden came into office promising to run a transparent administration, but the unfolding classified documents controversy is putting that pledge to the test.
White House officials have failed to answer key questions about what led to the discovery of documents in Biden’s possession and have also been less than forthcoming about who might have been in proximity to them.
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Classified documents have been found at Biden’s Wilmington home and his think tank, the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said repeatedly last Thursday that the search was complete, but it was later announced that additional documents were found in Biden’s home that night. The announcement was made on Jan. 14 while Biden was staying at the house.
Republicans have called for visitor logs from both locations to be publicly released.
“We want to know the visitor logs to the residence. We want to know who had access to the Biden center for diplomacy,” said Rep. James Comer (R-KY), who has called Biden’s home a “crime scene.”
The White House responded to the call by claiming that visitor logs from Biden’s Wilmington home do not exist.
It is unclear whether or not there are visitor logs at the Washington D.C.-based Penn Biden Center, which Biden used as a private office between 2017 and early 2021. White House and University of Pennsylvania officials did not respond when contacted by the Washington Examiner about visitor logs at the think tank.
Richard Painter, chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush from 2005 to 2007, said security breaches are much more likely at the think tank than at Biden’s home.
“The problem with the Penn Biden Center is the huge number of visitors in and out of there,” said Painter, now a University of Minnesota law professor. “I’m sure they had a night cleaning staff like every office in Washington D.C., and visitors included top donors to the university which, as we know, quite a few were from China.”
Painter added that he’s reluctant to say logs should be made public from private residences, be it Biden’s house or Mar-a-Lago, but that an office building in Washington is different.
“The Penn Biden Center’s logs ought to be public,” he said. “There is no expectation of privacy.”
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced on Thursday that the Justice Department appointed former U.S. Attorney Robert Hur as special counsel to the Biden documents.
But Biden has spent far more time in Wilmington since becoming president, staying there 163 full or partial days across 49 trips, according to the Republican National Committee. He’s on pace to spend more time on vacation than any other modern president.
“Every time I get a chance, I go home to Delaware. You think I’m joking. I’m not,” Biden said last February. He has called the White House a “gilded cage.”
Biden does keep visitor logs at the White House, something former President Donald Trump did not do, but officials have been steadfast in insisting that Delaware is different.
“I can confirm we are not going to be providing information about the comings and goings of the president’s grandchildren or people visiting him in Delaware,” then-White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in 2021.
David Greenberg, a Rutgers University history, journalism, and media studies professor, argues that too much is being made of the documents controversy by the GOP.
“It’s pretty obvious that the Republicans are making political hay of the issue,” he said. “It’s pretty different from the Trump case, especially because in Biden’s case it seems to have been completely unintentional and even unwitting. They clearly hope to use it to neutralize the case against Trump.”
The White House has issued its own defenses as well, saying that GOP critics have no credibility.
With so many questions unanswered, including what’s in the documents, what led to their discovery, when Biden found out, and why the public wasn’t told until two months later, speculation has run rampant about the rest of the story.
Craig Shirley, a conservative historian and Ronald Reagan biographer, thinks the saga could eventually become a Watergate-level scandal that prevents Biden from seeking reelection.
“He can’t PR this thing,” Shirley said. “He’s in too deep.”
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Greenberg, on the other hand, argues that some modest reforms could be made in order to secure visitor logs going forward, but that the current situation may not warrant much more.
“I don’t see any harm in passing a law calling for presidents to keep visitors’ logs at their homes,” Greenberg said. “But these Biden documents appear to have been relatively untouched since they were originally packed up. There’s no suggestion that they were shown to any visitor.”
