In his first public statement about Tara Reade‘s sexual assault and harassment claims against him, Biden shut down his accuser’s hopes of accessing his sealed archive of Senate papers housed at the University of Delaware for any corroboration of her claims.
“The papers from my Senate years that I donated to the University of Delaware do not contain personnel files,” the former vice president and Democratic presidential nominee said in a written statement on Friday.
Biden donated an archive of Senate papers to the university in 2011. The records were expected to be made public sometime in 2019, but the university said last year that the collection will be sealed from the public until two years after Biden “retires from public life” or two years after Dec. 31, 2019, whichever is later.
In an MSNBC interview on Friday, Biden adamantly defended his decision not to release the tranche of documents donated to the University of Delaware in 2011, describing its contents as position papers and private notes about his meetings with international leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, rather than personnel files.
“The idea that they would all be made public while I was running for public office, they could really be taken out of context,” he said.
Reade, 56, says that she was sexually harassed and assaulted by Biden when she worked as a staff assistant in his Senate office in 1993. She says that she filed a complaint about sexual harassment, not assault, that she experienced in Biden’s office with an outside Senate personnel office but never received a copy of it. Reade said that when she went looking for the record, a Senate personnel official told her that the record was likely given to Biden’s office, meaning that it could be housed in his archive of Senate files.
But it is up to each senator what to keep in their files. If Biden or his staff received a record of the complaint, someone may have thrown it out.
Reade does not remember the name of the office with which she filed a complaint, but Biden said that it would have been the Office of Fair Employment Practices.
“If that document existed, it would be stored in the National Archives, where documents from the office she claimed to have filed a complaint with are stored,” Biden said. “The Senate controls those archives. So I’m asking the secretary of the Senate today to identify if any such document exists. If it does, make it public.”
Reade suspected that Biden’s archive contained personnel files of those who worked in his office, and she hoped to search her own for notes or records that may have corroborated parts of her story, in addition to any record of the complaint she said she filed.
Biden’s composure, though steady for most of the MSNBC interview, started to fray under persistent questioning about the collection, particularly when asked why not have his aides, the university, or an independent body simply search for Reade’s name.
“There is nothing,” he said. “I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make.”
According to a University of Delaware spokesperson, operatives from Biden’s campaign accessed Biden’s sealed archive last spring after he launched his campaign. That would mean no operatives have accessed the archive since Reade went public with her allegations of sexual assault in late March but had accessed it after Reade and several other women came forward with complaints of inappropriate touching from Biden shortly before he announced his presidential candidacy.
