On Friday, Joe Biden responded for the first time to the allegation that he sexually assaulted one of his Senate aides, Tara Reade, in 1993.
The presumptive 2020 Democratic nominee’s on-the-record remarks came during an interview with MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski. She, at one point, cited a New York Times investigation, whose authors reported they could not find any former Biden Senate staffers to corroborate Reade’s claim.
The former vice president tried to take it further, however, suggesting that this same report said he is innocent.
The New York Times has explicitly stated this week that its reporting shows no such thing.
“The New York Times has investigated this exhaustively,” Brzezinski said Friday. “They didn’t find any of your former staff members who were able to corroborate the details of this allegation.”
This is true. The New York Times found no former Biden aides who could confirm Reade’s allegation. The paper did, however, find at least two sources who offered contemporaneous corroboration. Other witnesses have come forward since the publication of the New York Times report with additional corroborating evidence. Brzezinski mentioned none of these individuals.
Later, as Biden repeated his central claim that Reade’s version of events “did not happen,” he leaned on the New York Times’s reporting as evidence of his innocence.
“I’m not going to attack [Reade],” Biden said. “She has a right to say whatever she wants to say. But I have a right to say look at the facts, check it out, find out whether any of it — what she says is asserted or true.”
He added, “And based on the investigations that have taken place so far, to the best of my knowledge, by two major papers, they interviewed dozens of my staff members, not just senior staff but staff members, I’m told. At least that’s what they said, and nobody — this was not the atmosphere in my office at all. No one has ever said anything like this. No one has ever said anything like this.”
Though this is true about Biden’s former staffers, it is also true that the New York Times made clear this week that its investigative report is not exactly exculpatory for the former vice president.
“Our investigation made no conclusion either way,” a spokeswoman for the paper told the Washington Examiner. “[O]ur 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.”
She added, “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. The New York 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.”
In other words, it is cherry-picking to cite the report only to note that former Senate staffers could not corroborate Reade’s allegation. There is a lot more to the New York Times report than just former aides, and Biden and his campaign team know that.
The New York Times must really regret having allowed Biden’s campaign to take editorial control over some of the phrasing in its investigative report.
