While the White House revealed on Monday that no visitor logs exist for President Biden’s Wilmington residence – where numerous classified documents have been discovered – several people have been identified as guests at the house, a Fox News Digital review found.
Biden has hosted individuals ranging from congressional members to past campaign staff and current aides at his Delaware residence. Though the full extent of who has stepped foot inside the home may never be known, past reports, press releases and books have shed some light on who has visited there.
Biden hosted Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer, of New York, and Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, in October 2021 for breakfast at his Wilmington house to discuss Build Back Better, according to a White House press release. Their offices did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment about the meeting.
Biden’s son, Hunter, has had unlimited access to the Wilmington home. Though it remains unclear when the classified files from Biden’s time as vice president made their way into the home, emails reviewed and verified by Fox News Digital show the younger Biden listed the Wilmington, Delaware, address as his own permanent residence for his credit card and Apple account in 2018 and 2019, respectively.
Hunter has also made several trips to Wilmington with his dad since he became president in early 2021.
Others who have been at the house include past presidential campaign staff and current aides, including Steve Ricchetti, who just traveled with Biden over the three-day holiday weekend to his Wilmington house and is a longtime confidante. He currently serves as Biden’s counselor and previously was his chief of staff while he was vice president starting in 2013, before being tapped for a senior role at the embattled Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., after the Obama administration concluded.
In the 2021 book ‘Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency,’ journalists Amie Parnes and Jonathan Allen detailed how Biden hosted multiple advisers in the den of his Wilmington house, including Ricchetti, his sister and longtime campaign manager, Valerie, campaign manager Greg Schultz, and Mark Gilbert, who was described in the book as the ‘former U.S. ambassador to New Zealand and a heavyweight money bundler’ who was now the ‘vice chairman for private wealth management at UBS.’
The meeting took place in mid-January 2019 and served as a strategy session for his upcoming presidential campaign. One of the tough conversations Biden faced was about the lack of diversity among his top proposed campaign spots, prompting Gilbert to say, ‘Sir, with all due respect and, I’ll throw myself in there, everyone you’ve named is an old white guy. You can’t launch a campaign with all white guys. You’ll be dead.’ This conversation reportedly caused Biden to turn to Ricchetti and insist they hire Symone Sanders for the campaign.
Another anecdote from the book was from March 2020, about a week after Super Tuesday. On March 12, Biden was surrounded by his debate prep team in the study of his Wilmington residence, which included his sister, Valerie; press aide Elizabeth Alexander, who is now first lady Jill Biden’s communications director; Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff; Kate Bedingfield, the White House communications director; Symone Sanders, a former senior adviser on the campaign and a former spokesperson for Vice President Harris; and Jen O’Malley Dillon, who was Biden’s campaign manager and the current deputy chief staff.
Biden converted the basement of his Wilmington residence into a de facto campaign headquarters in March 2020 at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, where he frequently hosted virtual events and would have had to rely on campaign aides to help. Annie Tomasini, who is currently the director of Oval Office operations at the White House, and Anthony Bernal, a senior adviser in first lady Jill Biden’s office, ‘were allowed in regularly’ because ‘neither of them had their own families, which meant they could devote themselves entirely to the Bidens,’ the book said.
A day after the 2020 election, several of Biden’s advisers, including O’Malley Dillon, Klain, and Mike Donilon, who currently serves as Biden’s senior adviser, met with Biden in his study room at the Wilmington house, where O’Malley Dillon exclaimed, ‘Sir, you’re going to win.’
In ‘The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House,’ a book that was released on Tuesday, author Chris Whipple writes that Biden was in the library of his Wilmington home on Jan. 6, 2021, with Bruce Reed, who currently serves as his deputy chief of staff, when the insurrection occurred at the U.S. Capitol. The book also noted that Biden’s longtime confidante of several decades, Ted Kaufman, who chaired his transition in 2020 and early 2021, was his ‘next-door neighbor’ in Wilmington and asked him if he wanted to go for a walk in April 2020.
Biden has spent considerable time in Delaware since taking over the presidency, having been there for nearly 200 days, according to an Associated Press tally. During the visits, Biden stays at his Wilmington or Rehoboth Beach residences and has a full security detail. Top aides often accompany him on the trips.
Meanwhile, the White House Counsel’s Office said in a Monday statement that no visitor logs exist for his Wilmington home.
Republicans demanded the logs after Biden’s lawyers discovered the documents in the house. While it is common practice to keep comprehensive White House visitor logs, Biden’s lawyers say no such record exists for his Delaware home.
The Secret Service also said on Sunday that while the home has assigned detail, they do not keep track of visitors.
‘We don’t independently maintain our own visitor logs because it’s a private residence,’ spokesman Anthony Guglielmi told reporters.
Biden is facing a special counsel investigation into his handling of the classified documents. At least two stashes appeared at his Wilmington home and the Washington, D.C., office for Biden’s think tank, the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. The classified documents at the Penn Biden Center were first discovered in early November, but the White House didn’t disclose this until last week.
The White House did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
Fox News’ Bradford Betz contributed reporting.
Fox News’ Sophia Slacik, Anders Hagstrom, and Peter Doocy contributed reporting.
