2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden said Friday morning that the National Archives would hold his personnel records, but the National Archives have denied this. Biden…
2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden said Friday morning that the National Archives would hold his personnel records, but the National Archives have denied this.
Biden discussed Reade’s allegations of sexual assault against him for the first time Friday morning on MSNBC. The former vice president released a statement shortly before this appearance in which he again denied the allegations, noting that the papers he donated to the University of Delaware from his time as a Delaware senator do contain his personnel files.
He argued on MSNBC that his UDelaware files should not be opened up to the public as they could impact his political career.
“There is only one place a complaint of this kind could be — the National Archives,” the former vice president said in his Friday morning Medium post. “The National Archives is where the records are kept at what was then called the Office of Fair Employment Practices.”
“I am requesting that the secretary of the Senate ask the archives to identify any record of the complaint she alleges she filed and make available to the press any such document,” he added. “If there was ever any such complaint, the record will be there.”
But Biden’s comments on the location of these records are incorrect, according to the National Archives.
“Any records of Senate personnel complaints from 1993 would have remained under the control of the Senate,” the National Archives Public and Media Communications staff said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
A National Archives spokesman also told Business Insider that the archives do not hold Office of Fair Employment Practices records.
Center for Legislative Archives spokeswoman Dorothy Alexander pointed the DCNF toward rules of access regarding House and Senate records held within the Center for Legislative Archives — rules that prohibit opening House records for 30 years and Senate records for 20 years.
