University of Delaware sued after denying information request for Biden Senate collection
Natalia Alamdari
Delaware News Journal
A conservative nonprofit, along with a news website co-founded by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, are suing the University of Delaware for its refusal to release former Vice President Joe Biden’s senatorial records.
The university is violating the Freedom of Information Act by denying requests to release the documents, the lawsuit claims.
Biden’s sealed Senate documents, donated to the university in 2012, have pushed UD into the political spotlight this year. Some have suggested the collection could contain files related to former Senate staffer Tara Reade’s accusation that Biden sexually assaulted her when she worked in his office.
The nonprofit Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit Wednesday, on behalf of itself and the Daily Caller News Foundation. Both organizations have filed information requests for Biden’s Senate collection, along with any records about the preservation and release of the documents.
But the university maintains that Biden’s Senate papers are not public records, university spokeswoman Andrea Boyle Tippett said in a statement.
PAST PRESSURE:UD is now at the center of the sexual assault allegation against Joe Biden
Initially, the papers were expected to be available to the public two years after Biden’s last day in elected office. After Biden announced his bid for president, the conditions of the agreement changed. The documents will not be made public until two years after Biden retires from public life.
UD continues to state that it will not violate its contract by releasing the documents without Biden’s consent.
A former Senate staffer, Reade previously told the Associated Press that in a Capitol Hill office building in 1993, Biden pushed her against a wall, groped her and digitally penetrated her without her consent.
Biden has said the incident never happened.
Reade’s own public account of her allegations has shifted over the past year, and she has faced scrutiny for not stepping forward sooner. But traumatized victims of sexual violence are not always able to tell consistent stories about their abusers, and often do not share those stories at all, according to abuse experts.
Wednesday’s lawsuit is the latest in months of pressure on the university to open the collection for public review. In May, Reade’s attorney demanded Biden open up the archives — a vast collection that spans more than 1,850 boxes, along with 415 gigabytes of electronic records.
Shortly after, UD was the target of an ad campaign pushed by the Republican National Committee, claiming that the university is being “complicit in a sexual assault cover up” by not releasing the documents.
Now, Judicial Watch and the Daily Caller are leveraging a legal battle against the university’s long-held exemption from most Freedom of Information Act requests.
The university initially denied Judicial Watch and the Daily Caller’s requests because public funds are not used to support Biden’s Senate collection. The state attorney general’s office upheld this.
Judicial Watch and the Daily Caller argue that the university was able to make that statement without offering full corroboration that no state dollars went into funding the Biden collection.
“Partisan gamesmanship by a public university is unseemly and unlawful,” Daily Caller president Neil Patel said. “If they don’t want to do the right thing, we will force them in court.”
In accordance with Delaware law, UD and Delaware State University are not state agencies, and are exempt from information requests unless they directly pertain to the expenditure of public funds. The question of whether UD is public or private has been explored in numerous court cases.
UD has long pointed to its charter as evidence that it is a “privately governed, state-assisted university. While it must share information directly related to public funds, all other financial information is considered private. Because of this, taxpayers are largely kept in the dark about the school’s finances and business practices.
Whether the collection contains evidence of Reade’s accusation is unclear. Reade has maintained that her workplace discrimination and harassment complaint would be housed in the collection at UD. Biden has said that any personnel files would be in the National Archives, and not the UD collection.
The collection is still being curated, and the university expects the process to last until at least the spring of 2021.
Natalia Alamdari covers education for The News Journal.