When a cabal of leftist senators and the sisterhood conspired to derail the nomination of U.S. Supreme Court Brett Kavanaugh with preposterously false charges of sex assault and gang rape, they also began retailing a revisionist history about Anita Hill and her false charges against Justice Clarence Thomas.
The women who accused Kavanaugh, the narrative went, weren’t the first to suffer for speaking truth power. Before Christine Blasey Ford there was Anita Hill. She too, the narrative went, tried to stop the elevation of a sex predator to the high court when she bravely stepped forward with harassment allegations against Thomas. But, like Ford, she failed.
And who was partly to blame? Joe Biden (shown), the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, who didn’t give Hill a fair hearing, he said a few weeks ago.
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That claim was bad enough, but now, desperate to win the Democratic nomination for president, Biden is colluding in the revisionist history. He now says he always believed Hill told the truth.
That’s a lie.
Biden Thought Hill Lied
“I believed her from the beginning,” Biden said on The View. “I was against Clarence Thomas, I did everything in my power to defeat Clarence Thomas and he won by the smallest margin anyone ever won going on the Supreme Court.”
Biden might have opposed Thomas, but as The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway observed, he lied about believing Hill. That truth comes from the late liberal Republican Senator Arlen Specter in his memoir, Passion for Truth: From Finding JFK’s Single Bullet to Questioning Anita Hill to Impeaching Clinton.
As Hemingway wrote, the Left and its media auxiliary were furious at Specter for asking Hill tough questions, or even “simply questions she struggled to answer.”
Specter, she wrote, “began by noting that many people had reported Hill had praised Thomas and his nomination to the Supreme Court,” including a former coworker at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Another witness backed up that claim.
Hill disputed their claims. She also disputed the former dean of her law school, who said she had praised Thomas as a “fine man and an excellent legal scholar.” Then she claimed she didn’t know a woman named Phyllis Barry, who had told The New York Times that Hill’s allegations “were the result of Ms. Hill’s disappointment and frustration that Mr. Thomas did not show any sexual interest in her.”
Under questioning from Specter, in which he mentioned that two colleagues had provided statements attesting that she knew Barry, Hill was forced to concede that she knew her and had worked with her at the EEOC.
Another interrogatory bullet did even more damage to Hill’s credibility, Hemingway observed. Specter asked about USA Today’s report that Senate staffers told Hill a signed affidavit would force Thomas to withdraw and that Hill’s charge “would be kept secret and her name kept from public scrutiny.”
Specter asked Hill about it, Hemingway wrote, but “nine times she denied the claim, demurred, or otherwise attempted to get away from the question.”
Specter interviewed Biden for his memoir. “After this exchange Biden recessed the committee,” Specter wrote. “Biden told me in November 1998, ‘It was clear to me from the way she was answering the questions, she was lying.’”
Biden told his staff members, Specter wrote, to tell Hill’s attorneys that if her memory “is not refreshed by the time she gets back, I will be compelled to pursue the same line of questioning the Senator [Specter] did. Because it seems to me, she did what he said.”
Yet Biden has now apologized to Hill, as the New York Times reported last week, an apology that Hill says, of course, doesn’t cut it.
Biden’s First Lie
So now Biden is caught in Lie No. 2 about the Anita Hill matter. As The New American reported last month, he claimed that he didn’t give Hill a fair hearing. “To this day I regret I couldn’t come up with a way to give her the kind of hearing she deserved,” he said. “I wish I could have done something.”
That revision reinforces the idea that Biden and those mean old white men on the Judiciary Committee “silenced” a black woman.
The claim simply isn’t true.
But four of Hill’s friends, including two women, testified on her behalf. One told Judiciary Committee staff members that Thomas’ harassment began before Hill even worked for Thomas, then changed that story when it became clear it did not make sense.
Another of Hill’s putative corroborating witnesses had such a credibility problem she refused to testify. Thomas had fired her for calling a fellow employee a “faggot,” and she had attempted to retaliate against another former boss who fired her for incompetence. Biden lifted a subpoena that would have compelled her testimony.
Thirteen “other women” all said or testified that Thomas did not and never would do the awful things of which Hill accused him. All were Hill’s colleagues who would have been in a position to corroborate Hill’s account if Thomas had done what she said. But not one backed up her claims.
The FBI agents who investigated Hill’s claims thought she was lying.
And so, too, did Biden.
Photo of Joe Biden: AP Images
