Biden Has Ties to Univ. of Delaware Board Members Keeping His Archive Secret amid Reade Allegations

Some members of the University of Delaware Board of Trustees, which has sole authority over Joe Biden's Senate archive, have close ties to the former vice president, Fox News reported.Calls to make the archive public have grown over the past week as former Biden staffer Tara Reade's allegations of sexual assault, which Reade says occurred in 1993 when Biden was a senator for Delaware, have garnered increasing media coverage. The Biden campaign has denied the allegations.Biden deposited his Senate archive at the University of Delaware in 2012. Initially, the university promised to open the archive two years after Biden's last day in public office. However, in April 2019 hours before Biden announced his presidential campaign, the university decided to keep the archive closed until December 31, 2019 or until Biden retires from public life.The chairman of the university's Board of Trustees is longtime Biden donor John Cochran. In 1996, Cochran bought Biden's home for $1.2 million, shortly after which Biden's son Hunter was hired by MBNA, where Cochran was vice chairman at the time.Board member Terri Kelly, former CEO of W.L. Gore & Associates, donated the maximum legal amount to the Biden presidential campaign in 2019. Carol Ammon, another board member, has given $10,000 to the campaign and related PAC's. Five additional board members have donated upwards of $1,000 to Biden and affiliated PAC's.While the Biden campaign has denied the allegations from Reade, Biden himself has not directly addressed the allegations, including at a virtual town hall on Tuesday on women's issues during which he received the endorsement of Hillary Clinton. Democratic politicians including Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams have up to now backed Biden."I think the [Democratic National Committee] is a sham and their silence around what happened to me as a Democratic staffer is unconscionable," Reade told National Review on Wednesday.

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