An October 2020 Secret Service report
notes
that “Non-Criminal Protective Investigation Name Check Reports are kept until no longer needed, e.g., cut off at end of the month, and destroyed 30 days after cutoff.”
Top line: There should be visitor records for at least the last 60 days of visitors to President
Joe Biden’s
Wilmington, Delaware, residence. But there should be more than that.
Consider a hypothetical scenario: A building contractor with no criminal record and no listing on a government watch list is provided access to a president’s personal residence to do authorized construction work. A few weeks later, the Secret Service finds an advanced and very carefully hidden listening device in an area the contractor has had access to. But if the Secret Service has no record of who had access to the area in which the device was found, its protective mission fails. The Secret Service adopts a “no fail” mantra for protective security. But in this case, the spy might never be caught. Now imagine if the contractor wasn’t a spy but an explosives expert.
The Secret Service understands this concern, of course, hence why it employs access controls and background checks for those entering protected sites such as the White House, the Naval Observatory, and Biden’s Wilmington residence. Indeed, the Secret Service operates an entire protective intelligence division.
This is relevant in light of Biden’s classified documents scandal. Unlawfully retaining Obama-era classified documents at two different locations, Biden has already gifted his predecessor, Donald Trump, a
likely get-out-of-jail-free card
. Still, the president’s scandal worsened on Monday with the White House assertion that there are no visitor logs for Biden’s Wilmington residence. A Secret Service spokesman says, “We don’t independently maintain our own visitor logs because it’s a private residence.”
The idea that there are no records for those who have visited Biden’s home strains credibility. More likely: The Secret Service and White House are hiding behind the explicit definition of visitor logs.
The Secret Service noted, after all, that it does screen visitors to the residence. The Secret Service’s Protective Intelligence eXchange system allows its employees and other federal law enforcement officials to make secured name checks against an integrated federal watch list. This list includes people who are assessed as having an actual or prospective threat interest in protectees. Secret Service protocols entail the screening of visitors and guests against these watch lists. As noted at the start of this article, even noncriminal records of visitors are retained for a short period: Sometimes, a threat won’t become clear until after the fact.
Moreover, it’s not as if we’re talking about just any Secret Service protectee. Biden was protected by the Secret Service’s Vice Presidential Protective Division between 2009 and 2017. He has been protected by the Presidential Protective Division since Jan. 20, 2021. On an individual protectee basis, these are the two most heavily resourced protective divisions in the Secret Service. Excluding the 2017-2021 period when Biden was a private citizen, Secret Service protocol will have required the checking of any and all visitors to Biden’s residence against watch lists.
Congress should ask questions…
