The U.S. Secret Service does not track who President Joe Biden meets with when he is spending time at his residences in Delaware, according to the agency.
Biden spent roughly one quarter of the first year of his presidency at his homes in Wilmington and in Rehoboth Beach. During his time in Delaware, Biden took both personal days, as well as held meetings and conducted business. The Secret Service did not track the president’s visitors, official or unofficial, during that time, however, the agency told the New York Post.
The Secret Service made the admission to the Post in response to a Freedom of Information Act request for visitor logs covering over a year of Biden’s presidency. Secret Service Freedom of Information Act officer Kevin Tyrrell told the Post in a statement that “[t]he Secret Service FOIA Office searched all Program Offices that were likely to contain potentially responsive records, and no records were located.”
Biden’s son Hunter is currently under investigation for alleged tax fraud over his numerous overseas business dealings in countries such as China, Russia, and Ukraine. Emails from a laptop believed to belong to Hunter Biden suggest that the younger Biden introduced some of his foreign business associates to his father while Joe Biden was vice president under former President Barack Obama. No evidence suggests that President Biden has met with any of his son’s business associates since entering the Oval Office.
Getting records of the president’s official meetings outside of Washington has been an issue for transparency groups in the past. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) was only able to obtain records on former President Donald Trump’s meetings at his Florida resort Mar-a-Lago because of records kept by the Trump Organization, not the Secret Service.
“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 spokesman Jordan Libowitz told the Post.
“I have not seen any reporting that there is a ton of official business and outside meetings being done when Biden goes to his personal residence in Delaware for the weekend, mainly just going to church,” he added. “If he were meeting with foreign heads of state at his house in Delaware, that would obviously be a different matter, though.”
Revelations from Hunter Biden’s laptop were dismissed and censored by tech giants such as Facebook and Twitter in the lead-up to the 2020 election. Major news outlets have begun to acknowledge aspects of the story, however. The Washington Post and The New York Times have both confirmed details of the laptop saga. As The Daily Wire reported:
The Washington Post joined The New York Times on Wednesday in verifying some of the contents pulled off of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden and abandoned at a Delaware computer store in 2019.
The confirmations by the major news publications come weeks apart and roughly 18 months after the New York Post broke stories on Biden’s overseas business dealings, citing information from the laptop. The NY Post’s stories, published weeks before the 2020 election, were censored on social media and downplayed as likely products of Russian propaganda. At the time, neither Biden nor his father, now the President of the United States, claimed that the laptop or its contents were fake.