In an his exchange with Mika Brzezinski during his appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Joe Biden called for the release of any personnel records from the National Archives relating to Tara Reade’s written complaint about an alleged incident of harassment in 1993 when she was a member of his Senate staff. She said she filed the complaint through the proper channels established in the senate at that time and addressed it with her supervisors. Those documents are unaccounted for and the senior staff members Reade cited have denied her account.
Ms. Brzezinski then asked Biden about the documents relating to his time in the Senate housed in the archives at the University of Delaware. Biden seemed to bristle at the notion that he might open these for inspection as they contain his conversations with foreign leaders and could be taken out of context. Republicans quickly seized on this with calls for these records to be released and accusations that Joe Biden is hiding something from the American people. Sound familiar?
It has been reported that Ms. Reade will provide a statement over the weekend and there is a good chance she will be echoing the Republican argument that all Senate records should be released, including those at the University of Delaware. The “what is Joe hiding” meme has already started circulating and there is a headline story on Politico on Saturday www.politico.com/… Additional outlets such as NPR, PBS and CNN have similar stories questioning if his interview hasn’t created a new set of problems for the Biden campaign given one of his themes is transparency and accountability.
It’s important to remember that the story of Hillary Clinton’s email server started small and picked up momentum until it dominated all other considerations about her candidacy in both print and cable news. We learned that the public can be easily led toward assumptions of wrongdoing if they are under the impression that something is being kept from them. Republicans are going to beat this drum very hard, just as they with did the Clinton emails and once again it looks like they will have willing allies in the press.