DOVER, Del. — — The state Supreme Court is mulling whether the University of Delaware was justified in denying requests from Judicial Watch and the Daily Caller News Foundation for records related to the school’s receipt of President Joe Biden’s senatorial papers.
Biden donated his senatorial papers to his alma mater in 2012, when he was vice president of the United States. The donation includes more than 1,850 boxes of archived papers and 415 gigabytes of electronic records from his 36 years in the Senate. The donation is subject to a gift agreement that prohibits the records from being made publicly available until two years after Biden “retires from public life.
The university denied the requests, stating that the records sought were not considered public records under Delaware’s FOIA because they don't involved the expenditure of state funds by the school, which is privately governed but receives more than $100 million annually in state taxpayer money. The denial was upheld by the office of Delaware's Democratic attorney general and by a Superior Court judge.
Despite that ruling, the university apparently did not search for any responsive records. Instead, it submitted a sworn affidavit from a university lawyer who said she was told in January 2020 that no state funds had been used in connection with the Biden papers. She was also told that state funds are not used for the school’s email system, over which any relevant communications might have been made.
“The university performed no search related to the requests,” Green argued Wednesday. “It reviewed no documents apart from the gift agreement, but rather relied on previous inquiries of university staff. “
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