Read: Biden’s ‘affectionate’ behavior was an open secret

That delay was unfortunate even before Reade made her allegation public. As The Washington Post and HuffPost noted last year, Biden’s papers may help explain some of his most consequential actions in the Senate: his conduct during the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, his sponsorship of the 1994 crime bill, his vote for the Iraq War.

But Reade’s accusations make access to the papers even more crucial. Biden himself has said that sexual-harassment claims should be carefully investigated. When Christine Blasey Ford alleged, after Brett Kavanaugh was nominated tot the Supreme Court, that he had tried to rape her in high school, Biden said the Senate Judiciary Committee “should undertake a thorough and nonpartisan effort to get to the truth, wherever it leads.” When Reade herself came forward, Biden’s campaign said her claims should “be diligently reviewed by an independent press.”

But the press can’t thoroughly and diligently evaluate Reade’s claims without access to Biden’s papers. Reade attests that she filed a sexual-harassment complaint with the Senate against Biden in 1993, but she doesn’t have a copy. The Biden campaign says it doesn’t either. And neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post could unearth one. Reade says she “was told” that the document “was probably returned to Biden’s office. So it’s an archival material.” Is that true? Who knows. But unsealing Biden’s papers could help reporters find out.

Reade also contends that she told three staffers—Biden’s executive assistant, Marianne Baker; Biden’s deputy chief of staff, Dennis Toner; and his chief of staff, Ted Kaufman—that Biden harassed her (although she’s said she didn’t tell them the specifics of the alleged assault.) All three deny that. No one who worked for Biden at the time has corroborated Reade’s allegations, although former interns did tell the Times and Post that Reade—who had been supervising them—had been abruptly reassigned.

In other words, these accounts are a Rorschach test: Reade’s word, buttressed by some contemporaneous evidence, versus the denial of three staffers. But here, too, Biden’s papers could be useful. They may contain Reade’s personnel records, or the files of Baker, Toner, and Kaufman.

Read: The long arc of Joe Biden

When I asked Andrea Boyle Tippett, the director of external relations at the University of Delaware, whether Biden’s papers contained personnel or staff records, she said she didn’t know. But the papers of other former senators do appear to include such material. A description of Senator Edward Kennedy’s papers, held at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, explains that “staff files are a significant portion of the collection and reflect work done by the many individuals employed by Senator Kennedy.” Walter Mondale’s Senate papers, held at the Minnesota Historical Society, include files for various years with titles such as “Personnel: Current and Former” as well as “intra-office memoranda” and other documents from the senator’s chief of staff. None of this indicates whether the Biden papers contain clues as to what Tara Reade did or did not confide to her superiors in 1993. But it’s not outlandish to believe they could provide some clarity.