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How Long Will The Media Bury The Biden Assault Story?

In the span of a week, and no thanks to the mainstream press, the accusation by Tara Reade that Joe Biden sexually assaulted her in the mid-1990s gained infinitely more credibility than any of the accusations lodged against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

There are now four people who say that Reade told them about Biden’s assault around the time it happened in 1993. And a tape of “Larry King Live,” during which Reade’s mother apparently phoned in to talk about the abuse, has emerged.

The story Reade tells is that while working in Biden’s Senate office, she was told to deliver a duffel bag to the once and future presidential hopeful. She says Biden pushed her up against a wall, reached under her skirt, and violated her with his fingers. And that, when she resisted, Biden said, “Aw man, I heard you liked me,” and then, “You’re OK, you’re fine.”

Reade says she complained to her supervisors and then filed a complaint with the Senate’s human resources office.

We’re not talking about some hazy, half-remembered, and completely uncorroborated story about drunken high school hijinks that Democrats hoped would derail Kavanaugh’s nomination, and led to wall-to-wall coverage by the press.

Whether Reade’s story holds up to close scrutiny is far from certain. But it certainly deserves more scrutiny than it’s gotten. At least as much as the press gave a Supreme Court nominee. Biden, after all, wants to be the leader of the free world. And his party has repeatedly set the standard of proof for such accusations at the “believe all women” level.

What’s more, unlike Kavanaugh, Biden has a reputation for creepily and inappropriately touching women in public. In fact, last year seven women came forward accusing Biden of kissing, or hugging or otherwise touching them in ways that made them squirm.

Just as important, Reade doesn’t have an ideological ax to grind against her alleged assailant. She’s a liberal Democrat who presumably cannot fathom the thought of a second Trump term.

As is usually the case when a scandal involves a Democrat, the press did a perfunctory “investigation” after the accusations emerged, and quickly concluded that Reade’s story wasn’t entirely credible because she’d provided different accounts and because other Biden staffers don’t recall her complaining.

But it wasn’t long after the New York Times concluded its “investigation” that the Larry King video appeared. On it, Reade’s mother asks “what a staffer would do besides go to the press in Washington? My daughter has just left there, after working for a prominent senator, and could not get through with her problems at all, and the only thing she could have done was go to the press, and she chose not to do it out of respect for him.”

As Ryan Grim, former D.C. bureau chief for the leftist Huffington Post who’s now with the Intercept, put it, the King tape “calls into question the credibility of Biden’s denial.”

Subsequent to that, two more people came forward to claim that Reade had provided contemporaneous accounts.

The mainstream press has so far ignored these latest developments.

(This is to say nothing of the press’ steady silence about the increasingly obvious decline in Biden’s mental faculties.)

Such unpleasantries involving a Democrat are to be ignored or brushed aside until after the election, and even then the chances are slim it will ever be brought up. And anyone who tries to make an issue of it is immediately castigated for being a tool of Republicans.

Conservatives often complain that the media have a double standard. But they don’t. They have one standard: Do whatever it takes to get Democrats elected and keep them in office.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board.

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I & I Editorial Board

The Issues and Insights Editorial Board has decades of experience in journalism, commentary and public policy.

18 comments

  • How long, hopefully until after he is nominated and his name is on the ballot. As a Trump supporter I back Biden as the nominee, every Republican should.

  • How long will the press bury the story? Until Joe! is dumped by the DNC for their handpicked candidate or till November 4th when it will no longer matter.

  • They’ll ignore it until after the election, and then they’ll drop it completely because it won’t matter because their chosen candidate will lose..

  • The dems and the mainstream media did not care that Bill Clinton used an intern as a cigar humidor in his office, so I do not see them reacting negatively to what Joe “Dirty Digits” Biden did.

  • IMO his pick for a VP is the reason they ignore his obvious issues. Pick the “right” VP and through much voter fraud the libs win, Joe is found to be incompetent to hold office and resigns so the libs can finally get their un-electable, black female Pres.
    Personally I blame his wife for allowing him to make a fool of himself. She is totally in charge,

  • the answer to Mr Jones ‘article about falling death rate during this pandemic is possibly because fewer people are in hospital, fewer surgeries and fewer seeing their doctors!

  • There really isn’t a “media” covering this at all. They are propagandists, and censor negative content and just make things up to promote their candidate, Joe Biden.
    So they will never cover anything negative about Joe Biden, and will continue to smear and slander anyone who makes any accusations about him.
    This is the way the media functioned prior to the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal in the White House, and they have returned to that approach. They only cover Republican scandals.
    Democrat voters won’t pay any attention regardless.
    It is all about Trump.
    Bloomberg said it best, that he wouldn’t cover anything negative about a Democrat candidate and directed his media company to only cover negative stories about Trump.
    That’s the overwhelming propaganda response which is set in concrete.

  • If anyone in Biden’s family actually cared about him, they would have had him withdraw from the race long ago. He clearly has dementia and his mental faculties are degrading by the day. Allowing him to debate Donald Trump would literally place Trump in the position of conducting a battle of wits against an unarmed opponent.

  • “…the King tape ‘calls into question the credibility of Biden’s denial.'”

    You cannot all into question, that which has not occurred. Biden has not denied the allegation. His staff has issued a sterile, perfunctory, prepared statement of denial. The candidate himself, has not.

  • “filed a complaint with the Senate’s human resources office” – do they not keep records?

  • On a similar note, only Biden’s election will end the coronavirus crisis. On Joe’s inauguration day, it will be over, period. There may be two, three, four more waves of the virus causing many deaths, but nobody will notice. Any reports will appear in a paragraph or two on the bottom of Page F15 of the Washington Post. Just as a Democrat can do no evil, he can only do good where the media is concerned.

  • You have incorrectly quoted the mother’s statement to King. She said, “…out of deference.” It was King who repeated it as “respect”. That makes a big difference and the correct word has been or is being memory-holed. Part of the defensive spin to help Biden.

  • That photo should be on every newspaper’s front page, every magazine cover, at the top of every blog post and online article about this until people start to take it seriously.

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