WASHINGTON — Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas pleaded ignorance Tuesday about the existence of logs recording who has visited President Biden’s Delaware homes — stunning lawmakers who have sought the information for months.
Mayorkas, whose department includes the Secret Service, made his astounding “I don’t know” claim when Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) pressed him about a persistent lack of information following congressional requests.
“I don’t know whether the Secret Service maintains visitor logs of the president’s residence,” the DHS chief said. “But if they do and those have been requested, we will comply with the law.”
Biden regularly spends his weekends away from the White House at his Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach homes and his guests’ names are potentially relevant to GOP-led investigations of Biden’s role in his family’s foreign business dealings, as well as to special counsel Robert Hur’s criminal investigation of Biden’s handling of classified records.
The Secret Service claimed last year in response to The Post’s Freedom of Information Act request that “logs” of Biden’s Delaware visitors don’t exist, but that some documentation does.
Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said in January that agents “generate law enforcement and criminal justice information records for various individuals who may come into contact with Secret Service protected sites,” with an unnamed source adding to Fox News, “the Secret Service is prepared to provide available background information on vetted guests to Biden’s residence if requested by Congress.”
Grassley noted that members of Congress, including himself and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) sought visitor information Jan. 23 after the apparent confirmation that records exist, but have received nothing. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) also demanded visitor records in January.
“My and Sen. Johnson’s staff have been told that your department’s Office of General Counsel is a barrier to the Secret Service producing relevant material to Congress,” Grassley told Mayorkas on Tuesday.
“It appears that the Office of General Counsel is being used to shield and frustrate and obstruct congressional oversight,” Grassley said. “What steps have you instructed the Office of General Counsel to take to produce the requested material to me and Sen. Johnson? And what legal barriers exist to producing the Secret Service visitors logs to Congress if they can’t be given to Congress?”
Mayorkas replied: “Number one, the directive that I have issued is for our department to cooperate and comply with our oversight responsibilities and the requests that are made of us. And two, it is certainly false that the Office of General Counsel services barrier to that cooperation and compliance.”
Grassley followed up, “Sounds to me like we’ll get those records then. Is that right?”
Mayorks answered by pleading ignorance of the existence of “logs” — as opposed to less formal ledgers of guests — and saying “we will comply with the law,” which could represent another opportunity to avoid document production if the department determines there are legal reasons not to share the information.
Interest in the president’s Delaware visitors boomed after the early January revelation that classified records dating to Biden’s time in the Senate were discovered stashed at his former personal office in Washington and at his Wilmington home, leading to the appointment of special counsel Hur to investigate whether Biden or anyone in his orbit broke the law.
A cache of documents was found Dec. 20 in the Wilmington house’s garage next to Biden’s prized classic Corvette — after the discovery Nov. 2 of documents dating to his vice presidency at the Penn Biden Center in Washington.
Additional classified documents were found in other areas of the Wilmington home, including by the FBI, which also searched the Rehoboth vacation house and left with handwritten notes.
While vice president and in the years that followed, Joe Biden regularly interacted with his son Hunter and brother James’ international business associates — including from China, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Russia and Ukraine — contributing to interest in the Wilmington logs.
Hunter Biden listed the Wilmington home as his own address on a 2018 background check form — and his abandoned laptop contained a photo of a beaten-up box of “Important Doc’s” apparently at the house.
The Secret Service claimed last April in response to a Post FOIA request for Delaware visitor “logs” that it “searched all Program Offices that were likely to contain potentially responsive records, and no records were located.” In September, the Secret Service denied an appeal, telling The Post that “no responsive records” were found after an “additional search of relevant program offices.”
The Post subsequently filed a more broadly worded FOIA request on Oct. 10 — nearly six months ago — asking the Secret Service for “[e]mails that refer to visitors to President Biden’s residences” during his time in office.
A Secret Service FOIA staffer told The Post Monday that the search remains ongoing.
“[W]e are currently reviewing thousands of records in an effort to locate any documents responsive to your request,” the FOIA officer said. “Due to the vast number of documents to be review, we are unable to provide an anticipated date of completion at this time. We are diligently working to provide a final response to your request.”
Joe Biden has been at his Wilmington or Rehoboth Beach homes on nearly one-fourth of all days during his two-year presidency. He’s made 10 trips to his home state thus far in 2023.
At the White House complex itself, a digital system known as WAVES (short for the Worker and Visitor Entry System) keeps tabs on who visits.
Presidents can pick and choose what they reveal about White House visitor logs thanks to a 2013 DC appeals court ruling written by then-judge Merrick Garland, who now serves as Biden’s attorney general. Garland wrote for a three-judge panel that the president’s constitutional right to confidential communications means that FOIA doesn’t apply to visitor logs kept by the Secret Service — even though they otherwise would seem to meet the definition of “agency records.”
Garland’s ruling on White House visitor logs, however, has not been ratified by the Supreme Court, meaning that federal courts outside of DC are able to rule differently.
The group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) successfully sued to obtain records of visitors to former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, but the group walked away with little more than a 22-name list of a 2017 Japanese delegation’s visitors.
“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 last April, when the Secret Service first claimed to have no Delaware logs.
Unlike Trump, Biden doesn’t have a large business entity vetting his visitors and providing its own security processes.
Email records can provide a detailed snapshot of events involving the Secret Service. Internal records revealed via FOIA litigation in 2021, for example, exposed a bizarre coverup of dog-bite incidents involving then-first dog 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 actually bitten agents eight days in a row between March 1 and March 8 in addition to a White House visitor — after biting the thigh, arm and buttocks of two agents in Wilmington Feb. 28.
