Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden says Tara Reade, the former staffer who has accused him of sexual assault, is a liar.
In a piece at Medium.com today, for the first time Biden denied Reade’s allegation that Biden cornered her in 1993 and assaulted her.
Reade’s accusations “aren’t true,” Biden wrote. “They never happened.”
So much for the mantra “believe all women” that Biden himself said he believes.
Here’s the problem for Sleepy Joe. Reade told The Daily Caller she’ll testify to what she said under oath.
She’s Lying?
Biden spent the first 402 of his 973 words telling readers he’s been the supreme commander in the war against sex assault because he wrote the Violence Against Women Act 25 years ago.
“When I wrote the bill, few wanted to talk about the issue,” he averred.
Actually, if few wanted to talk about it, he likely wouldn’t have written the bill, but in any event such violence “was considered a private matter, a personal matter, a family matter. I didn’t see it that way. To me, freedom from fear, harm, and violence for women was a legal right, a civil right, and a human right. And I knew we had to change not only the law, but the culture.”
“Silence is complicity,” Biden wrote, and because “I recognize my responsibility to be a voice, an advocate, and a leader for the change in culture…. I want to address allegations by a former staffer that I engaged in misconduct 27 years ago.”
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And then Biden — who has an established record of unwanted touching, groping, hugging, kissing, and fetishistic sniffing about which at least seven women, including Reade, have complained — finally got around to denying Reade’s allegations.
“They aren’t true,” he claimed. “This never happened.”
In other words, Reade is either a liar or a deranged fantasist. But she can’t be telling the truth because Joe Biden sponsored the Violence Against Women Act.
The Reasons
Of course, Biden conceded, “women deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, and when they step forward they should be heard, not silenced,” but “their stories should be subject to appropriate inquiry and scrutiny.”
Whether Biden and his backers thought likewise when a woman and her crooked attorney falsely accused U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of gang rape we cannot know, but anyway, Reade’s story “has changed repeatedly in both small and big ways,” according to Biden.
Biden didn’t bother explaining the “small and big ways” in which Reade changed her story.
He claimed what his campaign has claimed. She didn’t raise any issues about his behavior with staff, and such was the “culture” of his office that such behavior would not be tolerated. Biden said the National Archives should release any such record if it exists.
She has said she raised some of these issues with her supervisor and senior staffers from my office at the time. They — both men and a woman — have said, unequivocally, that she never came to them and complained or raised issues. News organizations that have talked with literally dozens of former staffers have not found one — not one — who corroborated her allegations in any way. Indeed, many of them spoke to the culture of an office that would not have tolerated harassment in any way — as indeed I would not have.
There is a clear, critical part of this story that can be verified. The former staffer has said she filed a complaint back in 1993. But she does not have a record of this alleged complaint. The papers from my Senate years that I donated to the University of Delaware do not contain personnel files. It is the practice of Senators to establish a library of personal papers that document their public record: speeches, policy proposals, positions taken, and the writing of bills.
There is only one place a complaint of this kind could be — the National Archives.
Not if Biden’s people destroyed it long ago, or before the records were laid to rest in the document graveyard. And not if a helpful Biden torpedo disinterred and destroyed it after Reade’s charge surfaced — or even before.
Reade Will Testify
Almost 70 percent of what Biden wrote touted his virtues, and he spent the rest of the piece, another 247 words, telling readers about his many virtues and that unlike President Trump, he knows what accountability means: “I believe being accountable means having the difficult conversations, even when they are uncomfortable. People need to hear the truth.”
Maybe they will. The Daily Caller News Foundation reported yesterday that Reade is willing to testify under oath.
“I want you to release all the personnel records from 1973 to 2009 and be transparent about your office practices,” Reade told the DCNF. “I would like to hold you accountable for what happened to me, to how your staff protected you and enabled you, bullied me multiple times into silence.”
Continued Read: “You ended my career. You ended my job after you assaulted me. You claim to be the champion of women’s rights, but your public persona does not match your personal actions. I want this brought to light and I want you to admit it in public. I want a public apology for calling me a Russian agent and having other people try to smear my character in order to cover your crimes.”
Photo: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor
