It is no secret that President Joe Biden makes frequent trips to his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, but is he doing it to dodge White House visitor logs?
For the umpteenth time since Biden took office, Temporary Flight Restrictions are gracing the area around the president’s beloved city this weekend as he prepares yet another retreat on Air Force One back to his customized home in Wilmington.
Biden is far from being the president that has spent the most time away from the White House, but travel records indicate that he does have an affinity for regularly picking up to leave the Swamp on Fridays. During his first 29 weekends in office, the president was in Wilmington for 14 weekends and Camp David in Maryland for eight weekends.
These trips to Delaware from Washington DC usually begin on Fridays and often extend into Monday mornings and are usually facilitated by “a minimal number of staffers.”
Biden’s travel isn’t necessarily kept a secret, but the reason for his habitual flight up and down part of the East Coast still remains a mystery.
Multiple corporate news outlets have caught onto Biden’s frequent trips but have downplayed the extra travel as a normal release for the elderly president. These media companies, (yes, the same ones that threw fits when Trump would vacation away from the White House), have chalked the weekend trips up to Biden wanting to spend more time with his tight-knit family and away from what he calls the “gilded cage.” They even pointed to his frequent train trips home while he was a senator.
Even when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claimed that non-essential travel during the COVID-19 pandemic should be limited, the White House justified Biden’s trips home as necessary.
“The President lives in Wilmington; it’s his home. That’s where he’s lived for many, many years,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in March. “As any President of the United States does, he takes a private airplane called Air Force One to travel there. That is, of course, unique from most Americans, but I think most Americans would also see that as a unique circumstance.”
It’s easy to speculate on why Biden is leaving so much. After all, it’s abundantly clear that the president’s health has suffered over the last year. Last November, the then-president-elect slipped and fractured his foot while teasing his dog, Major. Some of Biden’s trips during his first weeks in the White House were to visit his Delaware orthopedist. The president also reportedly justified staying away during the Afghanistan collapse because he wasn’t “sleeping well.”
One prime contender among the theories for why he spends so much time in Delaware is that he wants to avoid White House visitor logs. While the Biden administration held out from releasing visitor logs for months, it finally gave in and publicized new batches in May of this year. Visitors who come to the White House are required to sign in but anyone — including doctors, possible conflicts of interests involved with his son Hunter Biden, or other politicians or lobbyists who befriend Biden — that visits his place in Delaware won’t necessarily be disclosed to the public.
While Biden campaigned on using his time in office to “restore transparency and trust in government,” the administration was very clear that any visitor logs from Delaware would not be released.
“I can confirm we are not going to be providing information about the comings and goings of the president’s grandchildren or people visiting him in Delaware,” Psaki said in August.
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