Joe Biden conceded that he didn’t remember the woman accusing him of sexual assaulting her three decades ago.
“I’ll be honest with you, I don’t,” Biden told MSNBC late Thursday.
Biden, 77, previously didn’t answer a question about whether he recalled Tara Reade, 56, who claims the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee forcibly penetrated her with his fingers in the Senate’s office buildings in 1993, when she was a 28-year-old aide working for him on Capitol Hill.
“I don’t remember any type of complaint she may have made,” he told MSNBC earlier this month.
Reade’s sexual assault allegation threatened to derail Biden’s third White House campaign, but her story has stalled as key Democrats stand behind the two-term vice president and Delaware’s 36-year senator. Reade’s efforts to find and release a complaint she made at the time have reached a dead end. The secretary of the Senate has said she has “no discretion” to make public a copy of a sexual harassment, not sexual assault, complaint Reade says she filed 27 years ago.
On Thursday, Biden was also asked what he would tell voters rethinking casting their ballots for him in the general election because of Reade.
“If they believe Tara Reade, they probably shouldn’t vote for me. I wouldn’t vote for me if I believed Tara Reade,” he said.
But the Democratic Party’s apparent standard-bearer added that her story “changes considerably” and “it never, ever happened.”
Biden’s Thursday interview was an hour-long, town hall-style program with Stacey Abrams, the failed 2018 Democratic gubernatorial nominee in Georgia, rumored to be on his vice presidential short list.
Biden insisted that Abrams’s appearance didn’t mean he was announcing his pick, but he did tout her work on voting rights and access.
“Stacey knows what she’s doing, and she’s an incredibly capable person,” he said.
Biden’s performance Thursday was peppered with his usual verbal missteps, seeming to misuse the acronym for the Paycheck Protection Program instead of the one for personal protective equipment. Earlier in the day, he confused the number of people who had lost their jobs due to the coronavirus pandemic with the number who had died from the novel respiratory illness.
