As I’ve always said, I go with the evidence in front of me. The evidence has changed, and for now I’ve changed my mind.
The case for taking Tara Reade’s accusations seriously rested on the fact that apparently she did tell several people of an incident of harassment while she was working for Joe Biden, fairly contemporaneously to the alleged incident.
But as I mentioned, there were certain eccentricities in her background that merited a second look, like her bizarrely fulsome praise of Vladimir Putin. Was that a red flag? Yes. Did it erase the accusation against Biden? No, not by itself.
Now we have a wider view, including some information that was brought up by several of our denizens here, and has been corroborated by professional and thorough reporting in Politico and PBS NewsHour.
1. Is there a pattern of actual, malicious harassment by Joe Biden — of the type that was known to be common among certain Senators (like Strom Thurmond and our own sainted Ted Kennedy)? Apparently not.
2. Is there a pattern by Tara Reade of dishonesty and manipulation? Apparently yes.
“You can use these words: manipulative, deceitful, user,” said Kelly Klett, an attorney who rented Reade a room in her home in 2018. “Looking back at it all now, that is exactly how I view her and how I feel about her.”
“She has a problem,” said Lynn Hummer, who owns a horse sanctuary where Reade volunteered for two years, beginning in 2014.
She described Reade as “very clever, manipulative. … I do think she’s a liar.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/15/tara-reade-left-trail-of-aggrieved-acquaintances-260771
And on the subject of whether there’s a pattern for Biden — beyond the touching and personal-boundaries issues that he’s already addressed. Apparently there isn’t one.
The PBS NewsHour spoke with 74 former Biden staffers, of whom 62 were women, in order to get a broader picture of his behavior toward women over the course of his career, how they see the new allegation, and whether there was evidence of a larger pattern.
None of the people interviewed said that they had experienced sexual harassment, assault or misconduct by Biden. All said they never heard any rumors or allegations of Biden engaging in sexual misconduct, until the recent assault allegation made by Tara Reade. Former staffers said they believed Reade should be heard, and acknowledged that their experiences do not disprove her accusation.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-74-former-biden-staffers-think-about-tara-reades-allegations
For Reade, this a lot of scrutiny for an ordinary person; and with the right spin, an unflattering story could be told about any of us. Politico’s juiciest quotes are all from people who rented to Reade, even as the relationships went beyond the merely transactional. If you squint really hard, maybe she was just trapped in a vicious cycle of monetary hard luck that is hard to escape. And maybe that required some manipulation, some tap-dancing, just to keep a roof over her head. This is not uncommon! Especially today, who can’t relate to that?
That’s a lot of squinting, though. You put this history versus Biden’s, and you just have to make a judgment call. For me, this puts Biden pretty much in the clear.
Thank you for insisting on following the facts. I greatly appreciate and respect that.
Duly noted and I appreciated this reality based approach to these allegations.
If she was scamming her landlords, the motivation there is obvious. What is the motivation in this case? She told family about the incident many years ago. It seems unlikely that this is an elaborate scam she’s been planning for decades.
She told her family about AN incident, and then failed to report it to any authorities.
We already know that what she said to family and friends is different from what she said publicly and to authorities. What we do NOT know is whether what she said to family and friends at the time has any relationship to anything that actually happened. We also know that she said different things about Mr. Biden a few years ago than she says now. We know that her story this year is different from her story in the beginning, we know that she contacted her neighbor in an attempt to “refresh” her neighbor’s recollections, and we know that that attempt failed.
Nobody has suggested Ms. Reade is running some elaborate scam. What the preponderance of evidence instead suggests is that there is only a coincidental relationship, if any, between what she says and the truth.
It’s the combination of her evolving story and personal pattern of lying matched to the overwhelmingly testimony of every other female staffer of Biden that this behavior never happened. Normally there would be a pattern of abuse, but there is not a single instance. This story is a nothing burger.
People who scam landlords can also be victims of assault. Personally, I think something happened between the two. She told family at the time, who apparently took her seriously. Whether her current claim is a fabrication or something she was uncomfortable revealing at the time… I don’t know. Given the seriousness of the charge, I think we need more evidence.
In a case which depends on the credibility of both the accuser and the accused, these various hit pieces only investigate the credibility of one side.. The result is predictable.
In effect, they asked about Reade. “Has she ever been less than perfectly truthful about anything?’
About Biden they asked ” have you ever heard him doing this type of thing to another staffer?”
If you wanted a different result, you could ask about Reade “Have you ever heard of her accusing another Senator of sexually assaulting her?” And you can ask about Biden. “Do you recall him ever lying about anything?”
You might want to split the difference, and ask roughly the same questions to both sides. But that would seem like a joke. Joe Biden’s dishonesty is so well documented about so many subjects that any staffer who said that they thought he always told the truth would look ridiculous..
In fact I’m not sure that these 74 staffers don’t look ridiculous already.. None of these 74 staffers have seen the videos of Biden groping and sniffing? None of them find this even a little sexual?
These are hit pieces, the same sort of stuff you saw from David Brock, in American Spectator. Or like the New York Post/Black Cube hit pieces on Weinstein’s accusers.