The New York Times said the Democratic National Committee – and only the DNC – should be responsible for investigating former Vice President Joe Biden’s Senate records.
The editorial board for the Times published the paper’s opinion on Friday calling on the DNC to pick a panel to sift through Biden’s Senate records held at the University of Delaware. The records purportedly hold a complaint against Biden filed by former staffer Tara Reade who worked with him when he was a U.S. senator.
Reade’s allegation against Biden entered the national spotlight in March. He directly addressed the allegation more than a month later on Friday, first issuing a statement denying the allegation then appearing on MSNBC for an interview. Notably, the interview was the 26th time Biden had appeared on a national news network since the allegation surfaced and the first time a host had asked him about it.
“As is so often the case in such situations, it is all but impossible to be certain of the truth,” The New York Times editorial board wrote of Reade’s allegation. “But the stakes are too high to let the matter fester — or leave it to be investigated by and adjudicated in the media. Mr. Biden is seeking the nation’s highest office.”
Reade said that she filed an official complaint with the personnel office on Capitol Hill about uncomfortable interactions she had with Biden, though not about the sexual assault. A copy of the complaint, she says, is located in Biden’s Senate records, which he donated to the University of Delaware in 2011. The records, consisting of 1,800 boxes of physical papers and 415 gigabytes of electronic data, document his time as a senator from 1973 and 2009.
In Biden’s interview on Friday, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee said that his Delaware records do not contain any personnel files, so Reade’s complaint would not be among them. He resisted calls to make his files public because they could be used as “fodder in a campaign.”
“While understandable, this concern is not prohibitive — and Mr. Biden’s word is insufficient to dispel the cloud,” the Times said. “Any inventory should be strictly limited to information about Ms. Reade and conducted by an unbiased, apolitical panel, put together by the D.N.C. and chosen to foster as much trust in its findings as possible.”
To date, Reade’s allegation has been corroborated by three people: her brother, a friend, and her former neighbor Lynda LaCasse. Reade also said she told her mother, who died in 2016, about the assault soon after it happened. A video has since surfaced of a woman calling into “Larry King Live” on CNN in August 1993, the same month Reade stopped working for Biden, and asking the host about an incident her daughter had with a “prominent senator.” Reade has identified the woman as her mother.
Several of Biden’s staffers from his time as a senator that Reade said she complained about Biden to have said they do not remember any complaints from Reade.
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