Haunted house
David Mark
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WILMINGTON, Delaware — The Joseph R. Biden Jr. Railroad Station. The Biden Welcome Center rest stop, a few miles north of the Maryland–Delaware state line on Interstate Highway 95. The Joseph R. Biden Jr. Aquatic Center.
Now, the Biden home garage?
It doesn’t quite have the same ring as the Delaware sites named after President Joe Biden, a former Democratic senator who held the post for 36 years before serving eight years as vice president. And unlike the First State’s other Biden landmarks, the president’s garage is not one to which the president and his allies want attention paid.
THE DELAWARE SITES NAMED AFTER ‘UNCLE JOE’ BIDEN
Not that it’s open and visible to the public. The garage of the president’s Wilmington-area home, a frequent getaway from the White House, is private property.
The Biden home is located in the upscale unincorporated neighborhood of Greenville, Delaware, in New Castle County. It’s a Wilmington suburb that is a short drive from the Pennsylvania state line, where the median family income is $159,632, per the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.
The house lies in the midst of Chateau Country, as it’s known locally. The leafy neighborhoods cut through gently rolling hills where mansions for decades have been home to descendants of the Du Pont family, once one of the richest in the country. They’ve been joined in recent years by credit card executives and other financial industry employees who commute to nearby downtown Wilmington.
Biden’s home is behind a phalanx of security, which increases exponentially when occupied on the weekends by the president, first lady Jill Biden, and sometimes other visitors, such as the president’s son Hunter Biden, who is under investigation by the U.S. attorney in Delaware over allegations related to tax fraud and lying about his drug use when he purchased a firearm. The younger Biden is also the focus of several House Republican-run committee investigations over allegations of influence peddling during his father’s tenure as the vice president and as a senator.
The two-car garage in the president’s home away from the White House features his prized open-top 1967 Stingray Corvette. The car was a gift from his father for his first wedding. Joe Biden’s sons, Hunter Biden and the late Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden, once rebuilt it for him as a Christmas gift. In an August 2020 presidential campaign video, Joe Biden backed the Corvette into his garage, where boxes and other items were piled nearby.
The Corvette hearkens back to a more innocent time in Biden’s public relationship with his beloved home state, the nation’s second-smallest after Rhode Island. The Biden name, in fact, dots the Wilmington-area landscape around northern Delaware.
The train station recognizes the estimated 8,000 round trips Biden took between Wilmington and Washington during his Senate career. After his first wife and baby daughter were killed in a car crash in December 1972, Biden for years made an effort to be present as his sons, Hunter and Beau, grew up, traveling back each night from Washington on the train.
Meanwhile, the I-95 rest stop was named after the Bidens by a 2018 resolution following its restoration. And the city of Wilmington named the pool after Biden, who as a youth was a frequent visitor and has said he interacted with gang leader “Corn Pop.” Biden frequently told that story during his successful 2020 White House bid, when he defeated Republican President Donald Trump.
Classified documents controversy
Now when Biden is mentioned in connection with Delaware, it usually has to do with the FBI’s search of his home regarding the potential mishandling of classified documents going back to his eight years as vice president in President Barack Obama’s administration. The documents had been stored at the Penn Biden Center, which was affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania and served as a well-paying sinecure for the former vice president while he was out of office.
On Nov. 2, while packing files at the Penn Biden Center, Biden’s attorneys found classified documents dating to his vice presidency. The documents, Biden said at the time, were found in “a box, locked cabinet — or at least a closet.” According to the White House, the documents were immediately reported to the National Archives, which recovered the papers the next day. On Dec. 20, another set of classified documents was spotted in Biden’s garage in Wilmington.
The whole episode became public in early January. Attorney General Merrick Garland then appointed Robert K. Hur as special counsel on Jan. 12 to probe into the “possible unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or other records.” On Jan. 20, after a 13-hour consensual search by FBI investigators, six more items with classified markings were recovered from Biden’s residence.
All of this has drawn unwanted attention to the president’s Delaware home. Rep. James Comer (R-KY), who leads the House Oversight Committee, recently sent the White House a message noting his concern that Hunter Biden may have had access to the garage while being involved in foreign business dealings. Comer asked for information related to the documents found in the president’s garage, calling it a “crime scene.”
Meanwhile, the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), is also launching an investigation. Jordan recently sent a letter to Garland on Feb. 3 indicating the committee was reviewing the Justice Department’s activities while it examines how the classified documents were handled.
Biden’s defenders point to Trump’s holding of classified documents once he left office. On Aug. 8, 2022, FBI agents searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, office, and storage in Florida to recover government documents and material he had taken with him when he left office in violation of the Presidential Records Act. On Nov. 18, 2022, Garland appointed a special counsel, federal prosecutor Jack Smith, to oversee the federal criminal investigations into Trump retaining government property at Mar-a-Lago, among other things.
Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, has also acknowledged finding classified documents at his Indiana home. Pence’s lawyers immediately informed the National Archives and the Justice Department. Federal agents recently searched Pence’s Indiana home for evidence, with the former vice president, governor, and congressman’s consent.
Nevertheless, the documents episode has focused on the president’s house in Wilmington, which he often visits on weekends. As president, Biden has spent part or all of nearly 200 days in Delaware so far, whether he is visiting his home in Wilmington or his $2.7 million property in Rehoboth Beach.
Biden has said Delaware provides more freedom than being in Washington.
“I said when I was running, I wanted to be president — not to live in the White House, but to be able to make the decisions about the future of the country,” he said in February 2021, noting that the White House was “a little like a gilded cage in terms of being able to walk outside and do things.”
Many presidents visit their previous homes at some point in their term. Trump headed to Florida and New Jersey. George W. Bush returned to Texas, and Ronald Reagan traveled to California. And John F. Kennedy frequently visited Massachusetts, Florida, or Virginia during the weekends instead of staying at the White House.
Biden’s Rehoboth Beach house also recently got pulled into the classified documents story. The FBI on Feb. 1 searched the coastal southern Delaware property. Biden’s lawyers said the “planned search” did not yield any classified documents from his time as vice president.
Campaign headquarters
Before the classified documents drama erupted in early January, Delaware had figured into a lower-stakes Biden controversy — where the president’s reelection headquarters should be located. Biden hasn’t officially announced he’s running for reelection in 2024, but he is widely expected to.
In December, Politico’s “West Wing Playbook” reported on concerns by potential campaign staffers about placing the reelection headquarters in Wilmington, rather than nearby Philadelphia or Washington, D.C.
Anonymous would-be staffers grumbled about “the city’s sleepy nightlife and restaurant scene.”
Longtime Delawareans, though, contend Wilmington would be an ideal place for Biden’s reelection headquarters. The 20-minute drive to Philadelphia International Airport is actually quicker than the Pennsylvania city’s fashionable Center City neighborhood, where younger Biden campaign staffers would presumably gather after-hours.
And it would put Delaware in the national eye for a prolonged period of time. Many people think about the First State mostly for having to pay tolls while driving through a short stretch of its northeast corner on I-95. Or perhaps they only do so when sending in their monthly credit card payment.
“When I see the national television reporters standing alongside our local downtown skyline and/or along the local Amtrak terminal or the Christina Riverfront, it gives me a sense of local pride that one of ours ‘made it,'” said Sam Waltz, a Wilmington-based public affairs specialist and a resident of a neighborhood near the president’s, who has known members of the Biden family for decades.
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“In a way, that puts our entire community in the national eye,” Waltz told the Washington Examiner.
The classified documents controversy continues to brew, so a contretemps over the location of the Biden campaign’s headquarters might seem like a welcome relief. With a special counsel now looking into the scandal and House Republicans talking it up on a daily basis, Delaware will continue to be in the national spotlight — just not in the ways the state’s monuments to Biden were intended.