Secret Documents: Home and refuge of Joe Biden, a headache for the White House

is where the President Joe Biden takes refuge in Washington, a place that is part home office, part family Sunday dinner venue, a safe haven for his prized 1967 Corvette, and an impromptu field study during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now Biden’s house in Wilmington, Del.it is under new investigation as a repository for classified material.

The White House confirmed Thursday that confidential files were found in the garage of Biden’s Wilmington home, as well as in an adjacent room that the president later identified as his personal library.

The disclosure came three days after the White House said similar classified material had been located in Biden’s former Washington institution. The findings, taken together, led the Attorney General merrick’s wreath to appoint a special counsel to oversee the matter.

The ad attracts more attention at Biden’s house in Wilmington, where he usually spends his weekends and where he finds more freedom and a more homely atmosphere than at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Congressional Republicans, now in control of the lower house, ask to see visitor records of homes of the president, claiming that the discovery of confidential files in one of his residences is a risk to national security.

For a similar fact, the FBI raided Donald Trump’s villa in Mar-a-Largo where it found confidential documentation. And now the ex-president faces a criminal case.​

“When I ran for office, I said I wanted to be president, not to live in the White House, but to be able to make decisions about the future of the country,” Biden said in February 2021, soon after assuming the presidency. . Living in the White House, he said, It’s a bit like a gilded cage in terms of being able to go out and do things.

In his presidency thus far, Biden has spent part or the totality of 194 days in Delaware, his home state and most weekends at his home in Wilmington or Rehoboth Beach, where he owns a $2.7 million home, the Associated Press estimated. This weekend will return to Wilmington.

Despite the avalanche of criticisms, especially from the Republicans, for periodically escape that stateWhite House officials say his time in Wilmington is important for a president who returned home every night for his 36 years as a senator.

Biden can also carry out presidential operations at his home, where meets regularly with consultants, and a National Security Council aide travels with the president on weekends to Wilmington.

“All the Presidents they can work from anywhere I’m in, because that’s how presidencies are equipped,” former White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in February 2022, as Russia began its invasion of Ukraine and Biden geared up for another weekend in Wilmington. He confirmed that Biden can make secure calls from “wherever he is, yes.”

Biden’s Wilmington home, built to his tastes and completed in 1998, is located in upscale Greenville and cute with a lakein a neighborhood whose inhabitants they are used to it to secret service vehicles and the headlights of guard cars.

It’s very close to his church, St. Joseph on the Brandywine, and a branch of Wegman’s, an upscale grocery store, has opened in recent months.

The house is also the culmination of Biden’s decades of searching for the perfect family home and obsession with ownership. Over the years he has bought several houses in Delaware and then sold them at a profit.

“Joe has a very good eye and if he had a million dollars, he would spend it not on travel, but on his house,” said his sister, Valerie Biden Owens, in the biography of the president written by journalist Jules Witcover. The book, Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption, describes him as a “frustrated architect”.

So significant is the Biden home that when the former vice president raised the possibility of a second mortgage to pay off his ailing son Beau, then-President Barack Obama categorically refused “with a force that surprised me,” Biden wrote in his 2017 memoir, Promise Me, Dad.

“I’ll give you the money,” Obama told him, Biden said. “I already have it. You can give it back to me whenever you want.”

Jill Biden has also written lovingly about the house, describing it Glazed terrace -full of family heirlooms, countryside memorabilia and works of art- dubbed “one of my favorite places in the world”.

“The little room has a lake view behind our house, and I like to sit with my feet up on the couch, wrapped in a pashmina, grading my homework there at Northern Virginia Community College, where I taught literature and writing for eleven years,” she wrote. where the light enters.

“It’s a room made for coziness and comfort.”

The Biden shelter

This Biden haven quickly became their seat campaign in March 2020, as Americans were suddenly cooped up indoors with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and presidential candidates abandoned in-person campaigning for virtual roundtables and Zoom fundraisers.

Biden continued with the campaign at home much longer than his opponent, Donald Trump, which has caused some resentment among Democrats and ridicule from Republicans, who have claimed that Biden he was chained in the basement.

But he also allowed a rare peek into the Bidens’ private home as he answered questions. sitting in front of libraries full of books and would post photos on Instagram of him and Jill painting Easter eggs in the kitchen.

In May 2020, when Biden was speaking from his home at the Asian American and Pacific Islanders Victory Fund, the honking of the geese repeatedly drowned out his voice.

“There’s a pond across my property,” Biden explained. “There are a lot of Canada geese. If you hear them honk, they’re cheering.”

The White House was called this week to do it view the visitor log at Biden’s personal home, but it’s unclear if it exists. Outside of family members and trusted advisors, there is little public knowledge about who enters and leaves by the Biden family, especially when it comes to presidential issues.

One exception was Senator Joe Manchin.

In October 2021, Biden personally invited influential West Virginia Democrat and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to his home. to have breakfast and visit the propertya deeply personal gesture from a president who was working to get Manchin to pass the Democrats’ massive spending package that fall.

Manchin allegedly called off those efforts two months later, and an angry White House responded that Manchin had engaged Biden “at his home in Wilmington,” interpreting the senator’s announcement as a personal betrayal.

Now Biden’s house returns protagonist of a political headache for the White House.

Garland said Thursday that the Justice Department was notified Dec. 20 by Biden’s personal attorney that he had found classified material in the garage of the president in Wilmington.

In addition, the department was notified on Thursday that more documents were found that were marked classified. elsewhere in the Wilmington home.

When asked about Thursday’s revelations, Biden was relatively brief in his responses, saying this I’ll talk more on the topic “soon” and that it takes confidential material very seriously.

But Biden also wanted to make one thing explicit about his home.

“By the way, my Corvette is in a locked garage, huh,” he noted. “So it’s not like she’s parked on the street.”

Associated press

Translation: Elisa Carnelli

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