Accuser Rips into Biden, Calls for Record Release: Your Staff 'Bullied Me Multiple Times into Silence'
Tara Reade, the former Senate staffer who has accused former Vice President Joe Biden of sexual assault, is demanding transparency from the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
In a Tuesday interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation, Reade called on Biden to release documents pertaining to his time in the Senate, during which period (1993) she alleges that Biden kissed her, touched her and penetrated her with his fingers without her consent.
“Joe Biden, I want you to release all the personnel records from 1973 to 2009 and be transparent about your office practices,” Reade told the DCNF. “I would like to hold you accountable for what happened to me, to how your staff protected you and enabled you, bullied me multiple times into silence.”
“You ended my career,” she said of Biden. “You ended my job after you assaulted me. You claim to be the champion of women’s rights but your public persona does not match your personal actions.”
“I want this brought to light and I want you to admit it in public,” she added. “I want a public apology for calling me a Russian agent and having other people try to smear my character in order to cover your crimes.”
The Biden campaign has denied the assault and said it “absolutely did not happen.” The campaign did not respond to a request for comment on Reade’s demand for transparency from the DCNF.
Reade has said that she made harassment complaints to three Biden staffers, none of whom reportedly took action, and that she filed a written complaint with “a Senate personnel office” in 1993, according to The New York Times. Reade told the DCNF that she does not have a copy of this complaint, though she has attempted to track it down.
The Biden campaign released a statement following her assertions saying that Reade had never complained about inappropriate behavior, according to The Intercept.
“In all my years working for Senator Biden, I never once witnessed, or heard of, or received, any reports of inappropriate conduct, period — not from Ms. Reade, not from anyone,” Marianne Baker, who was the office manager in the Biden office at the time, said in the campaign statement.
“These clearly false allegations are in complete contradiction to both the inner workings of our Senate office and to the man I know and worked so closely with for almost two decades.”
The complaint would likely be held in Biden’s Senate records, which are housed by the University of Delaware Library — Senate records that cover a wide swath of Biden’s political career but are being kept secret until Biden “retires from public life.” Reade believes that her complaint is included in these records, she told the DCNF.
Beginning in 2011 and onward, according to The Washington Post, the University of Delaware had said it would keep the papers sealed “for two years after Biden retires from public office.”
The collection of these documents fills 1,875 boxes and includes 415 gigabytes of electronic records, according to The Post, containing committee reports, drafts of legislation and correspondence.
But the university, which has not responded to a request for comment from the DCNF, announced that the records would not be made available shortly before Biden made his presidential campaign official in April 2019.
The university then said that instead of waiting until Biden departs from “public office,” the documents would not be made available to the public until two years after Biden “retires from public life” — or after Dec. 31, 2019, without defining what “public life” is.
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A version of this article appeared on The Daily Caller News Foundation website.
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