Then Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Joe Biden urged senators in 1991 not to rely on an FBI report about Clarence Thomas, who had been accused of sexual harassment by Anita Hill.
Biden said that the FBI compiles interviews and does not come to a conclusion or make recommendations based on their findings.
“The next person who refers to an FBI report as being worth anything obviously doesn’t understand anything,” Biden said during Thomas’s confirmation hearing. “The FBI explicitly does not in this or any other case reach a conclusion, period. So, judge, there is no reason why you should know this. The reason why we cannot rely on the FBI report — you wouldn’t like it if we did, because it is inconclusive.”
“They say, ‘he said, she said, and they said,’ period,” he continued. “So when people wave an FBI report before you, understand they do not, they do not, they do not reach conclusions. They do not make, as my friend points out more accurately, they do not make recommendations.”
Biden, however, currently insists that a sexual misconduct allegation from 35 years ago made by Christine Blasey Ford against Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh should be probed by the FBI.
“We did that for Anita Hill,” Biden told anchors on the “Today” show last Friday.
In his opening statement to the committee in 1991, Biden told members that Hill was apprehensive about being interviewed by the FBI because she did not want her identity to be revealed to Thomas. She eventually was persuaded to go through with the FBI interview by Democrats on the committee. She also sent a personal statement to the committee about her allegations.
Following her public testimony, though, the FBI agents who interviewed her sent the committee signed affidavits that Hill’s public statements contradicted her interview with them, and that she left out key pieces of information in her interview with them.
The FBI agents stated in their affidavit that Hill never mentioned during their interview with her the public allegations she made about Thomas referencing a pubic hair on a Coke can or pornographic material with the name “Long Dong Silver.” (RELATED: Anita Hill Re-Emerges As Hero Of #MeToo Movement, But Testimony Fell Short)
Hill has also called for an FBI investigation of Ford’s allegation against Kavanaugh.
“In a real hearing and a real investigation other witnesses would be called, including witnesses who could corroborate, witnesses who could explain the context of the experiences of Dr. Blasey Ford and Judge Kavanaugh during that period in their lives, as well as experts on sexual harassment and sexual assault,” Hill told NPR.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley sent a letter Tuesday to Committee ranking member Dianne Feinstein informing her that he has no plans to delay Thursday’s hearing — where both Ford and Kavanaugh are expected to testify.