WASHINGTON, Broadcasting news corporation : Maybe it’s all he ever wanted. President Biden is taking heat for spending 40% of his days in office “on vacation” after he was away from the White House for two-thirds of August. Biden’s weekend jaunts and vacations spanned 234 days — with seven in 10 of them spent at his homes in Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach, Delaware — out of 589 days in office. RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel told The Post that Republicans believe it’s a winning campaign issue — alongside concerns over the effects of Biden-era spending, including Democrats’ $1.9 trillion stimulus package last year and this year’s $437 billion environmental and health care bill. “Voters want Republicans, who actually show up to work, to dig America out of Biden’s recession, secure the southern border, and put an end to reckless spending of taxpayer dollars,” McDaniel said. “Soon, Democrats will be able to join Biden on his weekly vacations when Americans vote them out in less than 70 days,” she added, referring to the midterm congressional elections. The 19-month tally of Biden trips was assembled by the RNC and is consistent with independent journalistic counts. It includes days that Biden spent at his Delaware residences as well as days at the presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland, and trips to Nantucket, Massachusetts, and Kiawah Island, South Carolina. White House spokesman Andrew Bates pushed back on the criticism of Biden’s travel, saying, “The presidency is a nonstop job that chief executives can do from anywhere in the world.” “Regardless of location, he has taken fewer vacation days than the modern norm,” Bates asserted. “Being somewhere other than the White House is not the same thing as being on vacation. And President Biden is constantly focused on the numbers that are most important to the American people: lowering costs for families — like prescription drugs and energy — reducing the deficit to fight inflation, creating the most jobs of any year in American history and bringing manufacturing jobs back from overseas, growing the membership of NATO, and passing the most significant gun reform law in almost 30 years.”
Although Biden’s staff dispute the characterization that he’s not working during the trips, he’s generally out of the public eye for most of his days away from DC while relaxing with family members and friends.
Transparency advocates, meanwhile, say it’s alarming that Biden refuses to release visitor logs for locations other than the White House — saying it makes a mockery of his administration’s self-praise for releasing partial West Wing visitor logs. First son Hunter Biden, who is under federal investigation for possible tax fraud, money laundering and lobbying violations in connection to his foreign business dealings, often travels with his father after repeatedly introducing his dad to associates during his vice presidency. Tom Fitton, president of conservative transparency group Judicial Watch, said, “One would hope that President Biden is working when he is on ‘vacation’ in Delaware, [but] the unwillingness of the White House to disclose his official visitors at Delaware suggests that there is something to hide — including that Biden is completely checked out from his job when away from the White House.” At the same time, Fitton said, “The secrecy makes it easier for Hunter and the family to continue their grift.” The Secret Service told The Post in April that it was unable to locate any records of visitors to Biden’s Delaware residences. The Post submitted a Freedom of Information Act appeal challenging that claim. For more than a decade, Judicial Watch and liberal group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington have battled in court for presidential visitor logs, including from personal residences. The White House has noted that Biden regularly travels en route to Delaware and other destinations with senior advisers, and deputy White House chief of staff Jen O’Malley Dillon vaguely attested to the president’s workload in a recent statement attempting to push back on the notion that Biden is simply enjoying R&R. “Any idea that there is a lot of downtime in this schedule is a fallacy,” Dillon told the Wall Street Journal this month. “He basically has a team around him, so that he has everything he needs at the ready, and then, because of Zoom, we build our schedules with him. Sometimes it’s speech prep, sometimes it’s digging in on a particular issue. Most every weekend, he has NSC stuff, he’s doing his economic stuff.” A White House official pointed The Post to readouts of Biden’s calls from Delaware with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, as well as public remarks from Delaware on monthly jobs numbers. But the majority of Biden’s days unfold out of view of the rotating White House press pool, which generally is kept far away from the president when he’s not in DC and frequently goes entire days without even a glimpse of Biden. On rare occasions, Biden has disclosed work encounters while away from DC, including an October 2021 breakfast at his Wilmington home with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and centrist Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) where he unsuccessfully tried to revive his $2 trillion Build Back Better spending package, which ultimately passed in smaller form this month. Biden also sometimes answers press questions while away from Washington — notably falling off his bicycle in June when approaching a group of reporters for Q&A near the shore in Delaware. A wire reporter helped break the fall of the 79-year-old commander-in-chief. The eldest-ever president has taken heat for his trips away before, including after spending more than a quarter of days in his first year in office in Delaware alone. Then-White House press secretary Jen Psaki said last year and again in January that Biden would not voluntarily publish visitor logs from Delaware. “Well, the president goes to Delaware because it’s his home. It’s also where his son and his former wife are buried. And it’s a place that is obviously close to his heart,” Psaki said in January. “A lot of presidents go visit their home when they are president. We also have gone a step further than the prior administration in many administrations in releasing visitor logs of people who visit the White House and will continue to do that.” Biden’s habit of spending weekends away from the White House continues former President Donald Trump’s practice of routinely jetting away for weekends — in Trump’s case, usually to go to his resorts in Palm Beach, Fla., and Bedminster, NJ. Before that, former President Barack Obama generally remained in DC for weekends. Data on presidential vacations has been meticulously tabulated for decades by former CBS News reporter Mark Knoller, who documented that Biden outpaced Trump and Obama in spending time away from the White House during his first 18 months in office, but that President George W. Bush exceeded Biden’s time away, due largely to 123 days at Camp David, including after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. According to Knoller, Biden has spent 63 days at Camp David, versus Trump’s 17 days and Obama’s 14 visits at the same point in their presidencies. As of mid-August, Biden spent 150 days at one of his Delaware residences, compared to Trump’s 132 days at his personal properties, Obama’s 38 days visiting Hawaii or Martha’s Vineyard and George W. Bush’s 100 days at his Texas ranch, according to Knoller’s records. Republicans slam Biden for his time out of the spotlight both for the perception that he isn’t working and because of his alleged role in his family’s overseas business dealings. Documents and photos from a laptop that formerly belonged to Hunter Biden indicate that he introduced his dad to business associates from China, Mexico, Russia and Ukraine — including at the vice president’s residence in Washington. Hunter Biden’s business partner Eric Schwerin visited the White House and vice president’s residence at least 19 times while Joe Biden was vice president, visitor logs show, casting doubt on Joe Biden’s claims to have been unaware of his son’s business ventures. Trump’s defense team at his 2020 impeachment trial cited Obama-era visitor logs that indicated then-VP Biden met with his son’s business partner Devon Archer around the time Hunter Biden joined the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma, where he earned a reported $1 million per year while his father led the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy. Documents from Hunter Biden’s laptop indicate that Joe Biden attended a 2015 DC dinner with a group of his son’s associates — including a trio from Kazakstan, a Burisma executive, the Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina and her husband, ex-Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov. A Senate report released in 2020 said a firm linked to Hunter Biden received $3.5 million from Baturina in 2014.
Presidents can pick and choose what they reveal about White House visitor logs because of an appeals court ruling that Attorney General Merrick Garland wrote as a judge in 2013. Garland wrote that a president’s constitutional right to confidential communications means that the Freedom of Information Act doesn’t apply to visitor logs held by the Secret Service. Records of off-campus visitors have seen less-robust litigation, though CREW successfully sued to obtain limited records pertaining to a Japanese delegation visit to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. By Biden’s own admission, he sometimes talks policy with his son, who joined the president’s vacation this month to Kiawah Island, SC. The president said in November that he consulted with his son ahead of a climate change conference in Scotland. The links between the elder Biden and his son’s business ventures often are murky. For example, it’s unclear if they have discussed his new art career, in which Hunter hopes to earn as much as $500,000 from anonymous buyers of his novice artworks. Hunter Biden earned at least $375,000 for five prints at a Hollywood art show attended by one of his father’s ambassador nominees, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. Joe Biden allegedly was involved with his son’s dealings with CEFC China Energy, which the Washington Post reported paid Hunter Biden and his uncle Jim Biden $4.8 million in 2017 and 2018. Former Hunter Biden business partner Tony Bobulinski says that he spoke with Joe Biden about the CEFC deal and a May 13, 2017, email says that the “big guy” would get a 10% stake in a new corporate entity. Bobulinski and that email’s author, James Gilliar, have identified Joe Biden as the “big guy.” In addition, Hunter Biden co-founded the Chinese investment firm BHR Partners in 2013 less than two weeks after flying with his father to Beijing aboard Air Force Two, introducing Joe Biden to BHR CEO Jonathan Li in the lobby of a hotel in China’s capital. BHR Partners is controlled in part by Chinese state-owned entities and facilitated the 2016 sale for $3.8 billion of a Congolese cobalt mine from a US company to the firm China Molybdenum. Cobalt is a key component in electric car batteries. Hunter Biden’s attorney Chris Clark said less than a week after President Biden’s November virtual summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping that the first son had divested his 10% stake in BHR Partners, but Hunter Biden and the White House provided no further details and online business records indicate that he still owns the 10% stake. Joe Biden in 2015 hosted his son and a group of Mexican business associates at the vice president’s official residence. In 2016, Hunter Biden emailed one of those associates, apparently while aboard Air Force Two for an official visit to Mexico, complaining that he hadn’t received reciprocal business favors. “I have brought every single person you have ever asked me to bring to the F’ing White House and the Vice President’s house and the inauguration,” he griped. NEWS COLLECTED FROM NEW YORK POST.