Then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) said during the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991 that FBI reports were useless because the “FBI explicitly does not, in this or any other case reach a conclusion, period.”
The clip has resurfaced as Senate Democrats are desperately trying to delay the confirmation vote for current Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh after allegations of sexual misconduct were recently made from over 30 years ago — without evidence or corroborating witnesses.
“The reason why I have worked so hard to keep FBI reports totally secret is because they have little or no probative weight, because they are hearsay,” Biden said. “The FBI does their interviews by walking up to person A and saying will you speak to us, and the guarantee is anonymity. That is what the FBI tells the person, and the FBI speaks to the person. Now, for us to summarily go back and say, as a matter of policy, that we are going to break the commitment the Federal Government makes to an individual, in order to get that individual to cooperate in an investigation, is disastrous.”
“And the last thing I will point out, the next person who refers to an FBI report as being worth anything, obviously doesn’t understand anything,” Biden later said. “FBI explicitly does not, in this or any other case reach a conclusion, period, period. So, Judge, there is no reason why you should know this. The reason why we cannot rely on the FBI report, you would not like it if we did because it is inconclusive. They say he said, she said, and they said, period. So when people wave an FBI report before you, understand they do not, they do not reach conclusions. They do not make, as my friend points out more accurately, they do not make recommendations.”
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