Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez said Sunday he views potential documentation of sexual assault allegations against former Vice President Joseph R. Biden as comparable to concerns raised about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails during her failed 2016 presidential campaign.
Mr. Perez told ABC’s “This Week” that the University of Delaware’s collection of Mr. Biden’s Senate records involves such things as policy documents and speeches, not personnel records.
Asked why the documents could not be searched for former Senate aide Tara Reade’s name to learn whether her alleged complaint about Mr. Biden’s alleged sexual misconduct is included in the archive, Mr. Perez grew frustrated.
“This is like the Hillary emails,” Mr. Perez told ABC. “Because there was nothing there. … And so when you ask the University of Delaware to take a look at something, you’re asking them to look for something that doesn’t exist, and the fact of the matter is that the president of the United States, the former president, Barack Obama, conducted an exhaustive search [for a vice president]. Joe Biden was an open book.”
Ms. Reade has alleged Mr. Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993. The University of Delaware’s curation of Mr. Biden’s archive reportedly will not be ready until the spring of 2021 despite previous indications that the university hoped to make his records available before the November election.
Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email while managing the State Department dogged her 2016 presidential campaign and led to an investigation by the FBI. Former FBI director James Comey, who was later fired by President Trump, said in July 2016 that the investigation did not discover that Mrs. Clinton intended to violate the laws regarding the handling of classified information but it did determine that Mrs. Clinton and her colleagues were “extremely careless.”
• Ryan Lovelace can be reached at rlovelace@washingtontimes.com.
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