Rep. Tom Kean, missing for months, is back home in New Jersey

Rep. Thomas Kean Jr., who has been missing from Washington for nearly four months with little explanation, is back home in New Jersey.

He could be seen from the street Wednesday evening, standing in a brightly lit front room of his Westfield home just before 8:45 p.m.

“It’s good to see you,” he said after a reporter for the New York Times rang his doorbell. He was wearing a dark suit and a red tie. “I’ll talk to you next week,” he said. “Thank you.”

Kean’s wife, Rhonda, stood in the background, smiling pleasantly. He declined additional comment and closed the door.

Aides had said that Kean, 57, was being treated for a health condition and was expected to fully recover, but had offered no additional details as their boss missed more than 100 floor votes since the middle of March.

Kean, a Republican, is running for a third term in November in one of the country’s most competitive midterm races. His absence from the campaign trail, though, had left even some of his biggest Republican boosters frustrated.

A spokesperson for Kean, Harrison Neely, said last week that Kean was expected to return to Washington on June 30. He declined to say how long Kean had been home or to offer any additional details about the representative’s long absence.

“He will be fully transparent on the 30th,” Neely wrote in a text message.

Earlier this month, Kean, in absentia, locked in the Republican nomination for his 7th District seat; he was running unopposed. Democrats selected Rebecca Bennett, 39, a former Navy helicopter pilot.

The Democratic Party considers Kean’s seat one of its best pickup opportunities as it seeks to tip the balance of power in Washington and had been aggressively targeting the race long before he began missing votes in Washington.

Kean was last spotted on Capitol Hill on March 5. He spoke that day during a committee hearing and cast a crucial “yea” vote in support of funding President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown and moving to end a government shutdown.

Then, he seemingly vanished. Neighbors in Westfield said there had been no obvious sign of Kean for months, and the family’s vacation house in Bay Head, N.J., appeared shuttered the weekend before Memorial Day. Year-round residents of Fishers Island, N.Y., where the Kean family owns a large estate, said they had not seen him, either.

Kean’s aides repeatedly insisted that he had no plans to abandon his reelection effort and that he was expected to return to work “soon,” even as they refused to discuss the medical condition that had sidelined him.

In May, after a debate between the four Democrats vying to run against him, Dan Scharfenberger, Kean’s chief of staff, offered a cryptic explanation for why there had been no sightings of the representative in Washington or in his New Jersey district. “There’s no cameras where Tom is,” he said, and did not elaborate.

During his absence, Kean has nonetheless bought and sold stock, introduced remarks into the Congressional Record and urged House colleagues from afar to oppose Ireland’s effort to limit trade with Israel.

A handful of Republican leaders in the 7th District’s six counties reported getting calls from Kean. And his office has released two statements attributed to Kean, including one on primary day, June 2, when he made no public appearances.

“Right now I am focused on my recovery and under the advice of healthcare professionals,” the June 2 statement said.

The statement indicated that he planned to be “completely transparent as to the nature of my medical condition.”

“I understand the need for transparency on this matter,” he wrote, “and I look forward to sharing my experience with the public.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.