New developments keep emerging in the sexual assault allegation against presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
On Friday, a sweeping PBS report appeared to bolster Biden’s denials of the charge from former aide Tara Reade, who claims he sexually assaulted her in 1993. But it shouldn’t get him off the hook. Not if we’re holding Democrats to the standard they applied to Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, when a last-minute accusation threatened to derail his nomination.
The PBS report is worth serious consideration. Reporters spoke to 74 people, mostly women, who had worked for Biden. None of them said they had ever experienced abuse or harassment at Biden’s hands, and they all said they’d never heard of any such thing happening in his office until Reade spoke out. Many described her claims as totally out of character with the man they knew and worked for. Some of the employees interviewed explicitly contradicted Reade’s claim that she was fired in retaliation for complaining about harassment, instead saying she was fired for poor performance.
We should perhaps view the report with a caveat: Former Biden officials are not an unbiased source. Staff in Washington are famously loyal to their bosses. Some may hope to work in the Biden administration if he wins, and no doubt, most are ardent Democrats who want to see Biden beat President Trump in November.
However, it’s nonetheless significant and makes it harder to believe Biden is truly guilty of the heinous charge he faces.
Even so, the acceptance of this evidence would evince gross hypocrisy and a double standard from Democrats — a total flip-flop from the Kavanaugh affair. Recall that 87 women who knew the Republican-appointed judge hosted a press conference to back Kavanaugh, describe him as an honorable man, and say that they believed the accusations against him were false. Biden was one among many who nonetheless asserted that all of Kavanaugh’s accusers, and all who accuse men of sexual assault, should be immediately and automatically believed.
The liberal media basically ignored the women who supported Kavanaugh. Democrats disparaged them as token supporters using a sort of “I have a black friend” defense.
So if we hold Biden to that standard for consistency’s sake, then his former aides’ words have no weight at all. At the very least, they shouldn’t get him out of hot water.
