« All of a sudden, the media are worried about partisanship in government | The FBI set Flynn up to take a fall »
April 30, 2020

Tara Reade's sexual assault allegation against Biden is not going away

By Andrea Widburg

We've documented here Tara Reade's allegation that Joe Biden, when still a powerful senator, sexually assaulted her in the Senate building.  The fact that she has told the same story over the years — rather than inventing it now for political or monetary advantage — gained credence when a recording turned up of her mother calling into the Larry King show in 1993 to ask for advice about a daughter wronged by a powerful senator.  The credibility factor shot up even more when two people who knew Reade in the mid-1990s confirmed that she told them back then about the alleged assault.

Biden hasn't spoken up about the allegations, nor has anyone in the mainstream media asked him directly.  Currently, according to BuzzFeed, the Biden campaign is pushing talking points claiming that the New York Times has absolved him of wrongdoing:

"Biden believes that all women have the right to be heard and to have their claims thoroughly reviewed," the talking points read, according to a copy sent to two Democratic operatives. "In this case, a thorough review by the New York Times has led to the truth: this incident did not happen."

The Times, however, says these talking points are inaccurate:

 

I would side with Biden on this one.  When the Times finally addressed Reade's allegations, the reporters went out of their way to dismiss her.  As I wrote:

The article isn't journalism.  It is, instead, a brief for the defense in a legal case.  The Times is cleaning up after a candidate who has a long history of peculiar and creepy behavior around women and little girls.  Rather than "believing all women," it's an effort to show that Reade is a liar and a Putin pawn.

Indeed, the Times is so desperate to salvage Biden's reputation against charges of sexual impropriety that it stealthily edited the article after publication to remove language that initially acknowledged creepy Joe's sexually abusive propensities.

Here's a tweet showing that infamous edit:

In other words, while the Times reporters couldn't actually absolve Biden of sin, they came as close to doing that as they could.  The Biden camp can be forgiven for thinking the Times was helping him out.

The Times wasn't the only one giving Biden a pass.  With reporters finally, reluctantly, catching up with the story, outlets such as The Daily Beast are acknowledging that women's groups have been peculiarly silent about Reade's allegations.

Other outlets are even more aggressively challenging Biden.  Damon Linker, a writer notoriously hostile to Trump and Republicans, wrote an article about the way Reade's allegations threaten Biden's campaign.  In it, he linked to a 2008 article in the leftist CounterPunch about Biden's abusive sexual habits:

Vanity is the most conspicuous characteristic of US Senators en bloc, nourished by deferential acolytes and often expressed in loutish sexual advances to staffers, interns and the like.  On more than one occasion CounterPunch's editors have listened to vivid accounts by the recipient of just such advances, this staffer of another senator being accosted by Biden in the well of the senate in the week immediately following his first wife's fatal car accident.   

Further evidence that Democrats are trying to disentangle themselves from Biden while they can still finagle some way to anoint another person as the Democrat presidential candidate can be seen in a Washington Post editorial calling on Biden to address the allegation directly, in a Times report about women's rights groups and other activists demanding to hear from Biden, and a surprisingly hard-hitting Don Lemon interview with veep wannabe Stacey Abrams in which he asks her about the allegations.  There is an alternative spin, though, for what Lemon was doing.  He might have been giving Abrams a chance to recite the party line to reinforce it with credulous viewers.  If that was Lemon's goal, he failed, for Abrams looked ridiculous trying to ignore the allegations and contort herself into believing Biden and complying with #MeToo requirements:

If I were a betting woman, I'd say that this is the beginning of the end for Biden.  I also wonder whether Michelle Obama is considering stepping in.  If not Michelle, I imagine an Amy Klobuchar/Pete Buttigieg ticket because those two are not hardcore socialists, they meet some identify politics metrics, and both managed to make it to the final rounds of the Democrat primaries.

At day's end, there's something terribly ironic about the fact that the Democrats thought they could destroy Trump because he talked about the fact that women let powerful men "grab 'em by the p----" (that is, consensual), only to nominate a powerful man who grabbed a woman by the p---- entirely against her will.

If you experience technical problems, please write to helpdesk@americanthinker.com