Joe Biden: Senate Records Detail Meetings with Putin, Could Be ‘Taken out of Context’

Former Vice President Joe Biden on Friday said he would not authorize the release of his Senate records, currently in the possession of the University of Delaware.

In an interview with MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski, Biden denied accusations of sexual assault from Tara Reade, a former Senate staffer. But he refused to release his Senate records to help prove his innocence.

Biden donated his Senate papers to the University of Delaware in 2012, which was set to release them to the public in December 2019. The university backtracked on the release when Biden announced his run for president in April 2019.

Biden admitted in the MSNBC interview that additional scrutiny on his Senate records would be bad for his presidential campaign.

“The idea that they would all be made public and the fact, while I was running for public office, they could be really be taken out of context,” he said.

Biden said that the records included details of his meetings with world leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“The papers are position papers,” he said. “They are documents that existed, for example, when I met with Putin or when I met with whomever. And all of that to be fodder in a campaign at this time, I don’t know of anybody who’s done anything like that.”