Biden asks secretary of Senate to locate Tara Reade complaint

Former Vice President Joe Biden sent a letter to the secretary of the Senate on Friday asking her to help locate a possible harassment complaint filed by Tara Reade, a former aide to the then-senator who claims he sexually assaulted her in 1993.

“I request that you take or direct whatever steps are necessary to establish the location of the records of this Office, and once they have been located, to direct a search for the alleged complaint and to make public the results of this search,” Biden wrote in a letter to Julie Adams, the secretary of the Senate.

“I would ask that the public release include not only a complaint if one exists, but any and all other documents in the records that relate to the allegation,” he added. 

Reade is one of several women who came out last year to accuse Biden of inappropriate touching. Earlier this year, Reade also claimed publicly that Biden sexually assaulted her in a semi-private location on Capitol Hill.

The former aide says she filed a harassment complaint with the Senate in 1993, when she worked in Biden’s office.

Biden has denied Reade’s allegations. He said in an interview on MSNBC on Friday that he never heard about a complaint and does not believe that one exists.

According to the letter, Biden says he understood that any such complaint, if it existed, would reside in the National Archives. However, after checking with the National Archives, Biden states in the letter that the government agency pointed him and his campaign in the direction of the Senate for record keeping. 

“We had understood that the Senate stores records from this office, and from this period, in the
National Archives. The Archives now states that the records would have remained under the
control of the Senate,” the letter read. 

Reade has said that she believes the complaint is in Biden’s Senate records, which are housed at the University of Delaware. The school has said that it will not release the records until two years after Biden has retired from public life.

Biden was pressed on MSNBC on Friday to authorize the release of those records, or to allow them to be searched for mentions of Reade’s name.

Biden said the Senate records at the university would not include Senate personnel records.

He declined to make the Senate records public or to allow for a search, saying that his political rivals could take the material out of context and use it against him in the general election.

“The fact is that there’s a lot of things that — of speeches I have made, positions I have 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 and the fact while I was running for a public office they could be really taken out of context,” Biden said.

“The papers are position papers,” he added. “They are documents that existed and that when I … met with Putin or when I met with whomever. And all of that to be fodder in a campaign at this time I don’t know of anybody who’s done anything like that.”