A setback for American presidential candidate Joe Biden in the fight with a former employee about sexual assault.
He hoped to find documents in the Senate archive that would set him free from charges of groping Tara Reade 27 years ago when he was a senator.
The Senate says that privacy laws make it impossible to disclose such personal information about ex-employees.
Reade made a complaint at the time. Whether she also reported that she was molested at that time is unclear. Recent reports that she did not dare to do this for fear of retaliation, she labelled on Twitter as “wrong”.
Last year she said she had been uncomfortable with Biden’s behaviour, only this year when the allegations of sexual misconduct were added. The 77-year-old former vice president is said to have pressed and touched her in his office in 1993.
Biden, a Democratic Democratic candidate in the November presidential election, first openly defended himself against the charges on May 1. He did not call them true. He also made a request to the Senate for inspection.