President Trump said Joe Biden could face further accusations of sexual misconduct in addition to the allegation by Tara Reade, who said Biden sexually assaulted her when she worked on his Senate staff in 1993.
Biden “could have others come out,” Trump said in an interview on Friday on the Dan Bongino Show, his most extensive comments on the issue so far.
Trump offered no evidence that other allegations might emerge.
The former vice president and presumptive Democratic nominee could release his records to help clear his name, Trump suggested. “If he added the records, that would be a great thing. He could show records and, you know, dispose of it with records,” Trump said.
“In a way, you could say I’m sticking up for him, but the mother was very compelling, certainly,” he said of a call Biden accuser Tara Reade’s mother made to CNN at the time the attack is alleged to have occurred in 1993. Reade’s mother did not specify what the incident was.
“I watched her, and she seems very credible,” Trump said. “The mother was so credible. The mother was great, and, I guess, a friend came out, so I don’t know,” he added.
A neighbor of Reade’s in 1993 said Reade told her the details soon after the attack allegedly occurred.
Earlier on Friday, Biden denied Reade’s charges in an interview on MSNBC and suggested the National Archives could release any documents “relevant” to Reade’s claim.
“People want to know the truth. People want to know if this woman’s accusation is true,” David Bozell, president of ForAmerica, a Trump-allied group, told the Washington Examiner, explaining how interest in Reade’s allegations spiked with the discovery of the CNN video. “How does her mother show up 20-something years earlier?”
Biden accuser Tara Reade “is far more convincing than [Christine] Blasey Ford,” Trump said, referring to Ford’s accusations of sexual misconduct against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his Senate confirmation.
In an interview this week, a senior Trump campaign official called Democrats’ relative silence over Reade’s charges “a double standard” that was a marked contrast to their “breathless rage” over Ford’s charges.
The #MeToo movement said that all women should be believed, but now they are “stone-cold silent,” this official said.
Trump campaign spokeswoman Sarah Matthews said a month has passed since Reade accused Biden of sexual assault. “The mainstream media has a different set of rules for Biden, and the double standards can’t be more clear: avoid asking him tough questions on Ms. Reade’s allegations,” she said.
Matthews added: “There is contemporaneous corroborating evidence of Biden’s alleged wrongful actions that didn’t exist for Judge Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing, where there was virtually no supporting evidence at all.”
