by Dave Lemery
Former Vice President Joe Biden, in a nationally televised interview, denied accusations of sexual assault from a former staffer in the early 1990s, saying Friday morning that the alleged attack “never happened.”
Tara Reade, who worked for Biden when he was a U.S. senator from Delaware, has alleged in a number of interviews that Biden assaulted her in 1993 on Capitol Hill.
Biden, the presumed Democratic nominee for president, put out a statement shortly before he appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program denying that Reade’s allegations were true.
He took issue with some of the specifics of Reade’s allegations, saying that her assertion she’d reported his alleged misconduct at the time was not true.
“She has said she raised some of these issues with her supervisor and senior staffers from my office at the time,” Biden said in the statement. “They – both men and a woman – have said, unequivocally, that she never came to them and complained or raised issues. News organizations that have talked with literally dozens of former staffers have not found one – not one – who corroborated her allegations in any way.”
The former vice president repeated his denials when he appeared on MSNBC.
“No, it is not true,” he said. “I’m saying unequivocally it never, never happened, and it didn’t. It never happened.”
Biden, 77, is in the midst of his third and thus far most successful campaign for the presidency. He left the race in 1988 after allegations that he had plagiarized a speech, and in 2008 he was bested by eventual nominee Barack Obama, who chose Biden as his running mate.
He was also a key figure in the impeachment of President Donald Trump over allegations that the president had improperly withheld aid to Ukraine as a means to compel the country to investigate Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. The younger Biden was on the board of a Ukraine-based energy company, Burisma, that has been linked to corruption in the country.
Biden said Friday that encourage a search of Senate records for any evidence that would corroborate or refute Reade’s claims, but he declined to agree to a search of his own private records, which are housed at the University of Delaware.
“The material in the University of Delaware has no personnel files,” Biden said. “But it does have a lot of confidential conversations.”
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Dave Lemery is a veteran editor and journalist with more than 20 years of experience. He is a contributor to The Center Square.
Photo “Joe Biden Interview” by MSNBC.
