Joe Biden’s Senate Records Will Stay Secret for Longer

Former Vice President and 2020 presidential hopeful Joe Biden continuously touts his decades of experience as a politician as a main reason for him to be “electable.”

But his actions around criminal justice, busing and the hearings into the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas have come under increased scrutiny since he announced his presidential bid.

At times, Biden has downplayed and even misconstrued how and why he voted on different topics. For example, last weekend he said that he did not support more funding for state prisons. In 1994, during his now infamous crime bill period, he argued for $6 billion in such funding.

Eight years ago, Biden donated a massive trove of Senate records to the University of Delaware under an agreement that they could be made public by early this year. But now, they’re secret, following new terms the university posted on its website just before Biden made his presidential campaign official in April, according to The Washington Post.

The collection of documents that Biden donated to his alma mater fills 1,875 boxes and 415 gigabytes of electronic records, including committee reports, drafts of legislation and correspondence.

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Those documents could better help the media and public understand why Biden has made the decisions that he has. But the limited availability complicates things and does not allow a full picture.

The original agreement with Biden and the unviersity was that the papers would be sealed “for two years after Biden retires from public office.”

But this year, on the day before Biden announced his presidential campaign, the university suddenly changed the way that it described those terms.

The university changed the wording to two years after Biden “retires from public life” or after Dec. 31, 2019, whichever is later.

A spokeswoman for the university told the Post that the documents are not public information and public records requests from media organizations have been outright denied.

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