The White House has still not released its visitor logs for July, the month President Biden gave up his re-election bid, leaving questions about who was seeing and advising the president before he made the historic decision to drop out.
Despite consistently releasing visitor records at the beginning of each month throughout Biden’s term, the White House as of mid-November is far past its usual timeline for releasing guest records.
It released its most recent logs on Oct. 4. These records covered visits to the White House until June 26.
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President Biden (AP Photo/Evan Vucci/File)
At the beginning of Biden’s presidency, media outlets praised the Biden administration for resuming the release of visitor logs after the Trump administration stopped the practice during his term. The New York Times spoke highly of the practice as “part of an effort to restore transparency to government.”
This practice revealed that Dr. Kevin Cannard, a top Parkinsons disease expert, made several visits to the White House in 2024, increasing anxieties about the 81-year-old president’s health and physical fitness.
After Biden’s poor debate performance on June 27, pressure for him to resign quickly mounted. But Biden did not drop out of the race until July 21. White House visitor logs would reveal who was close to the president in that critical month.
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President Biden is shown during the presidential debate in Atlanta on June 27, 2024. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)
This has led some, such as Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of the right-leaning government watchdog group Americans for Public Trust, to question the Biden administration’s reason for delaying publishing its records.
Sutherland criticized the Biden administration for failing to deliver on its promise and leaving the American people in the dark.
“The American people still don’t know who was coming and going from the seat of power in the lead-up to Joe Biden’s ouster and Kamala’s coronation,” Sutherland told Fox News Digital.
“At the outset, the Biden-Harris administration promised truth and transparency,” she added. “Now, in the dwindling days of their term, their refusal to release White House visitor logs from such a tumultuous period illustrates just how hollow that promise was.”
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Andrew Bates, a White House representative, responded to these criticisms by calling Americans for Public Trust a “dark money group” and pointing to the fact that the Trump administration did not publish any of its visitor records for the entirety of his term.
“It’s intriguing that this right-wing dark money group was silent for years as the Trump administration stopped sharing White House visitor logs with the public, but they have now abruptly developed an interest in transparency about records that we’ll be releasing in the near future,” he said. “We appreciate them inadvertently highlighting that Joe Biden leads the most transparent administration in American history.”
Bates did not comment on when the White House plans on releasing its July visitor records or what has been the cause of the delay.