Should Joe Biden lose in November, partisan Democrats can be expected to scream “but his archive!” — echoing what they saw as overcoverage during the 2016 campaign of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s private email server.
President Trump’s reelection campaign, a GOP super PAC, and other Republican groups intend to use Biden’s sealed archives at the University of Delaware as a primary line of attack in the general election. Those archives, which house potentially hundreds of thousands of personal files from the former vice president’s decades of time in the Senate, have remained inaccessible to the public.
On Friday, Biden asked the National Archives to “identify any record of the complaint” Tara Reade alleges she filed in 1993 after facing harassment in Biden’s Senate office.
“As a presidential candidate, I’m accountable to the American people. We have lived long enough with a president who doesn’t think he is accountable to anyone and takes responsibility for nothing,” Biden said in a statement. “That’s not me. I believe being accountable means having the difficult conversations, even when they are uncomfortable. People need to hear the truth.”
During an interview with MSNBC in the morning, Biden said he would not call on the University of Delaware to unseal his archive, citing “confidential conversations” contained in the documents and saying they could be misinterpreted.
Despite Senate archivists claiming the opposite, Biden said the only location of an alleged complaint would be in the National Archives.
“The former staffer has said she filed a complaint back in 1993. But she does not have a record of this alleged complaint,” Biden told MSNBC. “The papers from my Senate years that I donated to the University of Delaware do not contain personnel files.”
That same day, emails from the National Republican Congressional Committee began streaming into the inboxes of reporters asking whether certain Democratic candidates in swing districts will call on Biden to release “all Senate documents related to Tara Reade.”
“So, does Cisneros believe Tara Reade or the candidate he’s endorsed for president, Joe Biden?” read one email from the NRCC, in reference to California Democratic Rep. Gil Cisneros. “And like his colleague, Democrat Eric Swalwell, does Cisneros think Biden should release all Senate documents pertaining to Tara Reade?”
President Trump’s reelection campaign joined the chorus of GOP officials calling for access to the Biden archive, calling his unwillingness to give public access to the documents a “double standard.”
“Biden has a different definition of transparency than he sets for others. While he called for the complete release of Mike Bloomberg’s documents related to complaints against him, Biden made clear he does not want his University of Delaware records released because they could be used against him in the campaign,” said Trump 2020 Deputy Communications Director Erin Perrine in a statement. “He also falsely said those records are not ready to be made public.”
On Thursday, a pro-Trump PAC filed a public records request for access to the University of Delaware archives, although it will likely be denied as the school has denied similar requests from media outlets.
“While Democrats leaders and the national media can try to protect Joe Biden by ignoring this serious allegation, the University of Delaware cannot do the same,” Ed Rollins, chairman of the PAC, said in a statement. “As a publicly funded university holding public records, they must immediately release these critical documents in the public interest. Furthermore, since Joe Biden claims the allegations are false, he should want these records released to help clear his name. If Biden blocks their release, what is he hiding?”
