Lock 'Em Up
Joe Biden's Senate papers are safe from the prying eyes of opposition researchers
The trucks arrived at the University of Delaware on June 6, 2012. Workers unwrapped 33 pallets and unloaded more than 1,850 file boxes containing the official records of Joe Biden’s career as a United States Senator.
According to a university web page that no longer exists, the collection will “remain closed during processing for a period no sooner than two years after the donor retires from public office.” Biden completed his second term as vice president on January 20, 2017. The curator of the Biden Senate papers, L. Rebecca Johnston Maven, told Huffington Post reporter Amanda Terkel the papers would remain closed “at least until” December 31, 2019. If “processing” the vast collection of physical and other electronic documents took more time, Maven explained, the collection might stay closed longer than that.
In late April 2019, a day before Biden announced his run for the presidency, the university changed how it described the terms of its agreement. Instead of citing Biden’s departure from “public office,” WaPo’s Matt Viser reported, the university said the documents would not be made public until two years after Biden “retires from public life” or after Dec. 31, 2019, whichever is later. The university did not define what is considered “public life.”
“The entire collection is unavailable,” explained Andrea Boyle Tippett, a spokeswoman for the University of Delaware. “Its contents will become available, as the website indicates, when Mr. Biden retires from public life.”
“As he is currently running for office, he is in public life,” she continued. “Since retirement for anyone, not just public figures, takes different forms, I can’t speculate beyond that.”
The University of Delaware also declined public records requests for copies of the donor agreement with Biden, or any correspondence related to it. The “gift agreement,” Tippett said, “is not a public document.”
Mayday
In March 2020, Tara Reade came forward and claimed Senator Biden touched her inappropriately in 1993, when she worked for him as a staff assistant. For a month or so, Biden avoided any public comment on Reade’s charge. His campaign issued a brief statement denying the alleged incidents. The Washington Post editorial board wasn’t satisfied:
There are, at the moment, no clear conclusions. There may never be. But that is no excuse for not searching. One place to start is the records covering Mr. Biden’s 36-year Senate career, donated to the University of Delaware in 2012 and slated for release to the public two years after Mr. Biden “retires from public life.” These could contain confirmation of any complaint Ms. Reade made, either through official congressional channels or to the three other employees she claims she informed not specifically of the alleged assault but more generally of harassment. They could also contain nothing of the sort. Insisting on an inventory doesn’t mean one believes Ms. Reade or doesn’t believe her. It signals only a desire for the public to know all that’s able to be known, which ought to be in everyone’s interest.
On Friday morning, May 1, 2020, Biden went on MSNBC and sparred with Mika Brzezinski:
…Brzezinski pressed Biden to call on the University of Delaware to release his work papers just in case Reade’s complaint was there, rather than at the National Archives. Biden declined, saying the university wouldn’t have any personnel-related documents. He noted that it would have sensitive records of his private talks with foreign heads of state and high-level discussions on policy and legislation.
There was another reason Biden didn’t want those papers open: He didn’t them to fall into the hands of opposition researchers. “The idea that they would all be made public while I was running for public office — they could be really taken out of context” and become “be fodder in a campaign,” he told Brzezinski.
(You can watch highlights of Biden’s interview here.)
The Biden campaign then went into damage-control mode. In a statement released shortly after his appearance on MSNBC, Biden said his papers at the University of Delaware contained no personnel files. He requested the Secretary of the Senate ask the National Archives to identify “any record of the complaint” Reade says she filed at the time, “and make available to the press any such document.”
“If there was was ever such complaint,” Biden said, “the record will be there.”
In an email to CNN, the National Archives said any Biden office personnel records from 1993 would have “remained under the control of the Senate.” The Secretary of the Senate replied it had “no discretion” to disclose any records it might have.
As expected, the re-election campaign of Donald Trump weighed in:
“Biden has a different definition of transparency than he sets for others,” the campaign said. “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. He also falsely said those records are not ready to be made public.”
The conservative groups Judicial Watch and Daily Caller News Foundation promptly filed requests under Delaware’s open records law to get access to Biden’s Senate files. The University denied the requests, saying that because no state funds were spent in connection with the Biden files, they were exempt from disclosure. In July 2020, the groups sued the University of Delaware. Three years later, the Delaware Supreme Court ruled in favor of the university.
No Basis
The FBI found approximately a dozen classified documents in Biden’s Senate papers at the University of Delaware, but there is no evidence Biden willfully retained those documents, Special Counsel Robert Hur wrote in a report released Feb. 8, 2024. “It is likely that the few classified documents found in Mr. Biden’s Senate papers were there by mistake,” Hur wrote. “The documents found at the University of Delaware are not a basis for criminal charges.”
Judicial Watch and the Daily Caller News Foundation petitioned a court in Delaware to reopen their case against the University of Delaware. According to the complaint:
…the Special Counsel Report found that “Mr. Biden asked two of his former longtime Senate staffers to review his boxes in courtesy storage,” and that “[t]he staffers were paid by the University of Delaware to perform the pre-gift review….”
“The court needs to reopen this case to determine whether the University of Delaware lied,” said Michael Bastasch, editor-in-chief for the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The Hur report provides disturbing evidence the University of Delaware misled the courts in order to hide Biden’s Senate papers,” added Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
The matter is unlikely to be settled before the November election. If Trump wins, then Biden’s Senate records will remain closed at least until January 20, 2027. If Biden wins a second term, researchers will have to wait until 2031.
Either way, historians will find the archives worth visiting. But I can’t imagine any opposition researcher will bother to make the trip.
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