Operatives connected to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign have accessed his Senate records stored at the University of Delaware, which remain sealed from the public, according to a new report.
The revelation comes as Biden faces pressure to release some or all of the records to the public to search for information that corroborates or refutes Tara Reade’s allegations that Biden sexually assaulted and harassed her when she worked in his Senate office in 1993.
A University of Delaware spokeswoman told Business Insider that Biden campaign operatives accessed the archive in the spring of 2019 after he announced his candidacy on April 25, but stressed no one had accessed it since the university’s library closed in mid-March due to the coronavirus.
That would mean no operatives have accessed the archive since Reade went public with her allegations of sexual assault in late March but accessed it after Reade and several other women came forward with complaints of inappropriate touching from Biden shortly before he announced his presidential candidacy.
Biden donated his Senate records to the University of Delaware in 2011. It was expected to be made public sometime in 2019, but the university said last year that the collection would be sealed from the public until two years after Biden “retires from public life” or two years after Dec. 31, 2019, whichever is later.
[Related: Could a closed archive hold answers on Biden sexual misconduct claim?]
Reade suspects that a sexual harassment complaint she filed with an outside Senate personnel office in 1993 may be stored in the archives, or that it could include notes from meetings she said she had with top staff members about harassment or information about retaliation she said she suffered after coming forward with the claims. Three top staffers vehemently deny hearing about her allegations, but two former interns have said they remember Reade abruptly losing intern supervision duties.
Ted Kaufman, Biden’s then-chief of staff, who later became a senator and is now heading up putting together a Biden transition team in case he wins in November, “took notes when I spoke with him,” Reade told Business Insider. “He’s now denying that we ever had the meeting, and I watched him take notes. Those notes would be in my personnel file, along with sick days or any kind of extra notes that I turn in.”
There is no guarantee that the archive contains information about Reade. It is up to each former senator what they choose to make public from their personal files.
“If anything is in the Senator’s papers, they’re his property, there’s no federal rule there,” Donald Ritchie, historian emeritus of the Senate, told the Washington Examiner earlier this month.
