Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez gave the final word on the body’s assessment of sexual assault allegations leveled against their presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden: it’s all a conspiracy and there’s “nothing there.”
Biden appeared on MSNBC on Friday to deny claims that he sexually assaulted a former aide named Tara Reade back in the early-1990s, but he refused, in the same interview, to release documents from his time as Senator, currently under seal at the University of Delaware. Contained in that cache, reportedly, is a human resources complaint from Reade, suggesting that she had been treated unfairly by Biden’s staff.
Biden, instead, said investigators contact the National Archives.
“There is only one place a complaint of this kind could be: the National Archives,” Biden he said. “If there was ever any such complaint, the record will be there.”
The National Archives said, over the weekend, that it doesn’t keep those kinds of records and suggested investigators contact the Senate.
Critics — not just Republicans — fired back at Biden, demanding that Biden unseal his records, but DNC chair Perez says there’s no need because Biden was “fully vetted” in 2008, when he was being considered for the presidential ticket, even though it’s not clear the Barack Obama presidential campaign viewed Biden’s Senate records.
“There’s been so many investigations of the vice-president. The most comprehensive investigation of the vice-president was when he was vetted by Barack Obama in 2008. I’m very familiar with the vice-presidential vetting process. They look at everything about you,” Perez told ABC News’ “This Week.”
“They looked at the entire history of Joe Biden, his entire career. And I’ll tell you, if Barack Obama had any indication that there was an issue, Barack Obama would not have had him as his vice-president,” Perez said, adding that Obama’s team was trustworthy and thorough. “Barack Obama trusted Joe Biden. I trust Joe Biden. And those investigations have been done.”
Perez then compared the investigations into Biden’s history with women to the Republican search for Hillary’s 30,000 missing emails, which he claims was a political stunt.
“This is like the Hillary emails, because there was nothing there,” Perez said.
Clinton’s use of a private server, located in the bathroom of her Chappaqua, New York, home, to handle classified emails while she was Secretary of State during the Obama presidency was, in fact, a legitimate issue. Clinton claims to have used the server out of convenience, as she found handling more than a single device with a single email system difficult, but investigators have never definitively established what material passed through those servers, or whether Clinton exposed sensitive information to foreign actors.
Biden’s issue is different, not simply because it’s a sexual assault claim as opposed to a potential violation of federal law, but because Democrats like Biden largely established the standard by which such claims are judged when they challenged then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh over a single, unsubstantiated sexual assault allegation from decades before.
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