Democratic Delaware Sen. Chris Coons downplayed an allegation of sexual assault against presidential candidate Joe Biden.
During a Wednesday interview with Chuck Todd on MSNBC, Coons said the New York Times found Tara Reade, a 56-year-old former Biden staffer, did not have a credible allegation of sexual assault, a charge the newspaper says misconstrues their reporting.
“I’m curious if you believe that the former vice president needs to address the sexual misconduct allegations against him. Does he need to address these directly? There’s certainly some people that are concerned about them,” Todd asked.
“Chuck, I believe he has,” Coons asserted, pointing to his voting record related to women’s issues.
“The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press have dedicated weeks of reporters’ time to digging in, calling people, contacting people, researching, and they all three have concluded that there’s no substance to these allegations,” Coons said.
Todd pushed back on the Democratic senator, saying the reports did not provide conclusive evidence. “It does feel as though we’re stuck in some sort of he said, she said. Do you believe that’s the situation we’re in?” Todd asked.
“I don’t think it’s just a ‘he said, she said.’ I think it’s a ‘he said, she said, the press thoroughly investigated and found there’s nothing there,'” Coons responded.
On Wednesday, the New York Times issued a strong rebuke to the Biden campaign for mischaracterizing the content of their reporting on Reade’s allegation.
“BuzzFeed reported on the existence of talking points being circulated by the Biden campaign that inaccurately suggest a New York Times investigation found that Tara Reade’s allegation ‘did not happen,’” Danielle Rhoades Ha, the paper’s vice president of communications, told the Washington Examiner in a statement on Wednesday. “Our investigation made no conclusion either way. As BuzzFeed correctly reported, our story found three former Senate aides whom Reade said she complained to contemporaneously, all of whom either did not remember the incident or said that it did not happen.”
“The story also included former interns who remembered Reade suddenly changing roles and no longer overseeing them, which took place during the same time period that Reade said she was abruptly reassigned,” Rhoades Ha also said. “The Times also spoke to a friend who said Reade told her the details of the allegation at the time; another friend and Reade’s brother say she told them of a traumatic sexual incident involving Biden.”
