Presidential candidate Joe Biden insisted on Friday morning that he had nothing to hide in light of accusations made against him by a former congressional staffer.
“I’m an open book,” he declared.
If that’s the case, why won’t Biden allow a search through his old Senate records?
The vast majority of Biden’s records from his time in the Senate now reside in the University of Delaware. Those documents, included in the 1,875 boxes of “photographs, documents, videotapes, and files,” which cover every one of Biden’s 36 years in the Senate, could contain important information regarding Tara Reade’s accusation against Biden, since she said she filed a formal complaint against him while she worked in his office in 1993.
Biden insists that the Delaware documents do not contain any record of Reade’s complaint, and he might be right. After all, his campaign operatives did scour through the University of Delaware’s archives shortly after Reade went public. But how can we know for certain?
Biden wants us to take his word for it. But by his own standard, simply trusting that Biden is telling the truth would be negligent. Biden’s standard is fair: Claims of sexual assault must be taken seriously and then thoroughly vetted, Biden told MSNBC’s Morning Joe. But Biden conveniently abandoned this standard during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing, and he’s abandoning it once again by preventing an independent search through his Delaware records, and thus a proper vetting, from taking place.
The “transparency” Biden has offered thus far isn’t transparency at all. It’s just a bone he can throw to his defenders, and an excuse he can use to claim that he’s at least tried. He’s right to ask for a search through the National Archives, where he believes Reade’s complaint if it exists, would be located. But this isn’t enough, and he knows it.
Biden even admitted that the reason his Delaware documents were resealed in April 2019 was because the information they contain could become fodder used against his presidential campaign, and he’s probably right. But that’s a consequence Biden must accept. And he certainly would if he were sincere about being an “open book.”
Reade’s allegation against Biden is not going away. It deserves to be investigated and reported, but right now, the only person preventing that from happening is Biden. It’s time to unseal the Delaware documents, or at the very least, allow an independent investigation into their contents to move forward.
