Joe Biden told to reveal visitor logs as more files found

There are signs Republicans will try to link a probe into the handling of classified files to Hunter Biden’s business dealings.

US President Joe Biden. Picture: AFP

The Republican congressman leading an investigation into President Biden’s handling of classified information has demanded he give the names of anyone who visited his Delaware home where confidential documents were found.

James Comer, chairman of the House committee on oversight and accountability, made the demand for a visitor log for the past two years in a letter to Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff.

“Without a list of individuals who have visited his residence, the American people will never know who had access to these highly sensitive documents,” Comer wrote yesterday, a day after the White House acknowledged that five more classified documents had been found at the home.

Chairman of the House committee on oversight and accountability, James Comer. Picture: Getty Images

In a sign that Republicans will seek to link the inquiry to an investigation into the business dealings of Hunter Biden, the president’s son, Comer said the log would establish “whether any individuals with foreign connections to the Biden family gained access to Biden’s residence and the classified documents he mishandled for years”.

Democrats had raised similar concerns about the security of secret files after the FBI found more than a hundred at Donald Trump’s residence in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, over the summer.

Comer told CNN he would not seek visitor logs for Mar-a-Lago.

“I don’t feel like we need to spend a whole lot of time [doing that] because the Democrats have [scrutinised Trump] for the past six years,” he said. “At the end of the day, my biggest concern isn’t the classified documents, to be honest with you. My concern is there’s such a discrepancy between how President Trump was treated … versus Joe Biden.”

Legal observers have pointed to differences in the two cases, including Trump’s refusal to turn over classified documents to the National Archives, and misleading statements made by his lawyers about them, which has led to an investigation for obstruction of justice.

However, the discovery that Biden had classified documents at a private office in Washington, as well as in Delaware, has created an acute problem for the president, who responded to Trump’s apparent removal of classified documents from the White House by saying: “How could anyone be that irresponsible?”

The files found in Biden’s home and office appear to have been improperly removed from the White House in January 2017, as Biden ended his time as President Obama’s vice-president.

The Times