Tara Reade, the woman who accused Joe Biden of sexually assaulting her, suspects that a key document about some of her claims — a complaint she filed to a Senate office about his behavior — may lie in his personal documents stored at the University of Delaware.
A thorough review of the archive could boost Biden’s claim to innocence, while a copy of the complaint or other documentation could also corroborate some of Reade’s claims.
Those protecting the records, however, have made either scenario impossible.
Biden’s archive, donated by him to the university in 2011, was expected to be made public sometime in 2019. But the university announced 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. The university refuses to reveal information about the records gift agreement from Biden to the university.
Adding more frustration for Reade as she hopes to prove her claims, individuals who worked in the Senate at the time say there’s little chance the document would be in the archives — or that it wouldn’t have been quickly destroyed after Reade’s initial complaint. Over two decades of Biden’s 36 years in office came when Congress infamously faced some of the least amount of oversight of any federal institution or agency.
Donald Ritchie, historian emeritus of the United States Senate, who worked in the Senate Historical Office in the 1990s, said that record-keeping of agencies that handled workplace complaints like Reade’s operated with nearly complete impunity before the passage of the Congressional Accountability Act in 1995.
“I can understand why there’d be a problem with the paper trail,” Ritchie told the Washington Examiner as Reade tried to find the record of her complainant in Senate offices.
“That act provides a lot more support for people who lodge complaints against their boss now. Before then, everyone just got fired,” Ritchie said, who said many lawmakers griped to him that they regretted voting for the bill in the first place.
He added that any personnel complaints were often handled by each office individually. In other words, if a woman filed a complaint against her boss, a lawmaker had wide discretion on what to do.
Reade told the Washington Examiner that she is working on making an official request to access any of her own personnel records stored in Biden’s Senate archives.
Reade, who worked as an assistant in Biden’s Senate office in 1993 when she was 29, says that Biden behaved inappropriately by stroking her hair, touching her neck, and sexually assaulting her in a “semi-private” area of the Capitol office complex. She has recalled a tense meeting in which another staff member told her that Biden wanted her to serve drinks at a donor event because he liked her legs.
The Biden campaign has strongly denied the allegations.
Three senior Biden staff members, who Reade says she complained to about harassment, not the assault, have told various media outlets that they have no memory of her complaints. Former staffers in Biden’s office at the time have told other news outlets that they do not remember any inappropriate behavior from Biden like Reade described or a request that she serve drinks at a reception, but some former Biden interns said that they do remember Reade being abruptly removed from her duties overseeing them, as Reade said.
Reade says that in 1993 she filed a complaint with an outside office about the alleged harassment, not assault, she experienced in the office.
“I filled out a form and talked about just the incident of the sexual harassment, feeling uncomfortable. And I was told at the window that somebody would call back, you know, call me back in. And they never did,” Reade said in a Democracy Now interview.
“I’ve tried to track that form down, and I was told it was probably returned to Biden’s office,” Reade said in the Katie Halper Podcast interview that revealed her sexual assault allegation for the first time.
Reade did not remember the exact name of the office with which she filed the complaint in 1993, but the Senate Office of Fair Employment Practices handled harassment complaints starting in 1992. That office was replaced with the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights after the passage of the Congressional Accountability Act.
She told the Washington Examiner that while trying to locate the complaint, a Senate personnel office told her that all documents regarding Biden’s Senate office would have been returned to him.
What senators keep from their offices in public archives widely varies, however. Biden or his staff, if they received a record of the complaint, may have thrown it out.
“If anything is in the Senator’s papers, they’re his property, there’s no federal rule there,” Ritchie said.
The Biden campaign told the New York Times that it did not have a record of a complaint from Reade. But few people, if any, know the full extent of what is in the archives.
“I don’t believe his archive has even been catalogued yet,” Ritchie said.
But a record of the complaint Reade filed in a Senate personnel office is not the only needle in a haystack that could bolster her claims.
The thousands of documents from Biden’s time in Congress from 1973 to 2009 may include staff personnel files, office administration records, or records of meeting notes — any of which may provide hints about or dispel aspects of Reade’s story.
According to the Washington Post, Biden’s records fill 1,875 boxes and 415 gigabytes of electronic records. Committee reports, drafts of legislation, and correspondence are included in the archive.
Naomi Lim contributed to this report.
