Republicans sense rich pickings in Biden archive – but will it be made public?

Richard Nixon had tapes. Hillary Clinton had emails. Joe Biden has an archive spanning 36 years in the US Senate. It’s a record of his thinking, on everything from criminal justice to the Iraq war, and it could offer rich pickings for reporters and Republican opposition researchers.

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The Biden senatorial papers comprise 1,875 boxes of “photographs, documents, videotapes and files” and 415 gigabytes of electronic records at the University of Delaware in his home state. They recently came to public attention when Biden was accused by Tara Reade, a former staffer, of sexually assaulting her in a Capitol Hill basement in 1993.

While vehemently denying that allegation in a TV interview on 1 May, the former vice-president simultaneously acknowledged the explosive potential of the archive’s many other contents.

“The fact is that there’s a lot of things, of speeches I’ve made, positions I’ve taken, interviews that I did overseas with people, all of those things relating to my job, and the idea that they would all be made public in the fact while I was running for public office, they could be really taken out of context,” he told interviewer Mika Brzezinski on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program.

“They’re papers or position papers, they are documents that existed and that – for example, when I met with [Vladimir] Putin or when I met with whomever, and all of that could be fodder in a campaign at this time.”

Biden, 77, also insisted that the collection does not contain personnel records, sending journalists on a wild goose chase through the National Archives and Senate in search of evidence of a complaint filed by Reade at the time of the alleged incident. The trail went cold, but the University of Delaware treasure trove remains tantalizing.

Last week the Republican National Committee launched a digital advertising campaign, raising questions about whether the university is keeping documents under seal related to the Reade allegation. One of the ads alleges: “University of Delaware is complicit in sexual assault cover-up.”

Judicial Watch, a rightwing activist group, is taking legal advice on whether it has grounds to take the university to court for access to the records. Its president, Tom Fitton, said on Thursday: “If we find that the documents are being withheld from us contrary to law, we are prepared to sue.”

Biden’s defenders argue he is merely following precedent: past senators who ran for president have not been required to disclose all their papers. But Fitton contended: “It’s not that they’re being required; the question is whether the records are available under law. If he had them at his house, maybe there’s an argument, but they’re not at his house. They’re at a university and subject to Foia [Freedom of Information Act].”

Biden’s records were donated to the University of Delaware in 2012. The university did not respond to questions for this article but Andrea Boyle, a spokeswoman, told CNN earlier this month that it is still “curating the collection”, a process likely to continue well into 2021, and the papers will not be released until two years after Biden retires from public life.

That is unlikely to deter newspaper editors sensing that Biden, first elected to the Senate in 1972 at the age 29, is likely to have skeletons in the closet. His long political career includes the 1991 confirmation hearings for supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, accused of sexual harassment, as well as his support for a 1994 crime law that contributed to mass incarceration. Then there was his 2003 vote authorizing the invasion of Iraq, which he has since said he regrets.

Furthermore, critics on the progressive wing of the Democratic party would be eager to scrutinize Biden’s links to the financial services industry, a big player in Delaware. Conservatives might hunt for documents linking Biden’s son, Hunter, to overseas business interests. In a replay of the 2016 campaign, when he encouraged Russia to hack Clinton’s emails, Donald Trump may welcome a chance to make mischief by demanding “transparency”.

Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “His papers are much more voluminous than Hillary Clinton’s emails, so I would expect there would be even more stories. Republicans are going to say, ‘You just know there’s some interesting material at the University of Delaware’. No, there really isn’t, but they know it’s a safe thing to say because it can’t be disproven before the election.”

There are practical objections, Sabato added, but Republicans will seek to turn those to their advantage. “First of all, you couldn’t publish it all or even open it all. He had an incredibly long career, a 50-year political career, and there are some personal items in there as well, from what I understand. How could you even manage to make it available to researchers, much less the general public, just a few months ahead of an election? It’s not going to happen.

“Therefore, it sets up the Republican line perfectly, which is, ‘What’s he hiding? How come he won’t show us?’ No one out there is going to going to say, ‘Well, of course, it’s an enormous amount of material and why would he and most of it’s junk,’ which is true, by the way .”

Other presidential candidates have faced similar pressures. Rich Galen, a campaign strategist for actor and former Republican senator Fred Thompson’s unsuccessful 2008 bid, recalled: “His papers from the Senate were at the University of Tennessee and his opponents kept quacking about the fact that we had locked them up, literally, because we didn’t want to go through every morning having some 12-year-old take five words out of a 300-word essay and have to defend it all day.

“So we just said to hell with you, if that’s what the fight is going to be about, then the fight will be about not getting access to the papers as opposed to what’s in the papers. And it’s a little hard to make the case that Biden won’t give up the papers at the University of Delaware while Trump has been in federal court for 27 years to protect his financial records.”