Vox has an article up by journalist, Laura McGann, about her investigation of Reade’s various claims against Joe Biden. McGann started working on the story over a year ago when she interviewed Reade about her initial charges that Biden touched her on the neck and shoulders when she worked in his Senate office 27 years ago.
McGann tells how she interacted with Reade, the corroborating witnesses Reade provided, and the story as she researched and it was reported at other media outlets. It is worth your time to read it. www.vox.com/…
While the overall narrative of the story is the difficulty McGann and other journalists have had trying to meet a threshold of credibility—with Reade’s piecemeal revelations, shifting stories, and the political implications--to be able to publish the story, there are two revelations within the larger story that were both big news to me.
The first nugget? The friend that Reade initially referred McGann to in 2019, that substantiated the Biden touched Reade on the shoulders and neck story, changed her story to line it up with Reade’s new assault allegation.
Last year, Reade encouraged me to speak with a friend of hers who counseled her through her time in Biden’s office in 1992 and 1993. The friend was clear about what had happened, and what hadn’t.
“On the scale of other things we heard, and I feel ashamed, but it wasn’t that bad. [Biden] never tried to kiss her directly. He never went for one of those touches. It was one of those, ‘sorry you took it that way.’ I know that is very hard to explain,” the friend told me. She went on: “What was creepy was that it was always in front of people.”
McGann went back and spoke with this friend again.
I spoke with Reade’s friend again this week. She said that Reade had told her about the alleged assault the week it happened in 1993. I asked the friend why, then, did she volunteer so explicitly that Biden “never tried to kiss her” or touch her inappropriately. “It just organically rolled out that way,” the friend said. “[Reade] and I had many conversations a year ago about what her degree of comfort was. She wanted to leave a layer there, and I did not want to betray that. It just wasn’t my place.”
Now for the second nugget: McGann helped Reade try to obtain the record of her complaint with office of the Secretary of the Senate.
The missing complaint
Reade told me last year that she gave a supervisor a written statement voicing her complaints about how she’d been treated in the office. The complaint was limited to the harassment allegation, not the misconduct allegation, she told me this year.
I helped Reade in 2019 request documents from a few offices to try to find the record. (Personnel files wouldn’t be released to a third party, like a reporter.) First, she put in a request with the Senate secretary’s office, which maintains some employment records. That office provided a copy of her payroll history, which confirmed her dates of employment and salary.
We next tried the Office of Personnel Management, which maintains federal records of employment, but the office was not able to track down a file in its electronic system. I then checked with a source who worked in a warehouse across the country where it would most likely have ended up to see if there was a physical file stashed there. He couldn’t find one.
In his interview with Mika Brzezinski on Morning Joe, and in a statement released before the interview responding to Reade’s allegations, Joe Biden said he was formally requesting that the Secretary of the Senate’s office take any and all steps necessary to locate and release the complaint Reade said she had filed. A few days later the Secretary’s office said that they were unable to comply with Biden’s request due to privacy laws.
What I did not know was that Reade had requested a copy of the complaint as well over a year ago. I had not seen that reported in any media stories about Reade’s allegations that discuss her assertion that she made a complaint.
According to USAToday, the Secretary of the Senate’s office said confidentiality laws prohibit the release of complaints even to the principals directly involved in the complaint:
The Biden campaign, through attorney Bob Bauer, replied to the Senate secretary's office on Monday asking for further clarity on three points: whether the existence of any such records is also confidential; if any such record could be lawfully disclosed to anyone such as Reade herself; and whether the Senate could release procedures, forms or instructions that would have been used in 1993 by the Office of Senate Fair Employment Practices when processing such complaints.
The office responded later Monday that disclosing the existence of any such record would "amount to a prohibited disclosure" and that it was not aware of an exception that would allow the office to share that information with anyone, "even to original participants in a matter."
The secretary's office said it also sent the Biden campaign a copy of the procedure laid out under Senate rules for responding to alleged misconduct at the time, which also was shared with USA TODAY. It includes counseling, mediation, a formal complaint and hearing steps that an employee may have chosen to take. A written formal complaint and hearing could only be conducted after counseling and mediation were completed. An employee could also have informally sought advice about their rights and rules without initiating procedures.
So it’s looking like we will never see this complaint, nor get confirmation as to whether it exists at all.