It is becoming apparent that certain factions in the Democratic Party see Tara Reade as a problem — and their one-sided skepticism promises to cause a dangerous divide.
Establishment Democrats and their media allies have snapped into place to shield Joe Biden from claims that he sexually assaulted Reade, a former Senate staffer, in the 1990s — and members of the Bernie Sanders wing are now condemning the party elites, Fox News reports.
The controversy kept growing on Monday as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) endorsed Biden for president, even as two more contemporaneous accounts of the assault surfaced.
Sanders supporters rebel over Reade
Since it surfaced this month, Reade’s allegation of sexual assault has been received with studied silence by powerful Democrats and the liberal media, making for a stark contrast from the way they treated sexual assault allegations against then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The party’s response is testing its claims to support sexual assault victims, and some on the left say the Dems are finally showing their true colors.
Reade claims that Biden sexually assaulted her when she was working in his Senate office for a brief period in the 1990s. Her allegation received shocking new corroboration on Friday when old video surfaced of a distressed-sounding woman calling into the Larry King Live program in 1993 about a problem her daughter was having with a powerful senator. Reade said that the woman on the phone was her late mother, who said:
Yes, hello. I’m wondering 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.
That footage — like most everything to do with Reade’s claim — was largely ignored by Democrats and the media, but as Democrats line up behind Biden, some on the left are going the other way. Members of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) failed campaign are bucking the socialist patriarch’s own endorsement of Biden and withholding theirs — while carefully distinguishing themselves from a party they see as corrupt and hypocritical, Fox News reports.
Nick Brana, Sanders’ former 2016 campaign national outreach coordinator, said that the Democratic party can either “pull Biden” or “admit that suppressing progressives” is the party’s true purpose, while Briahna Joy Grey, his former 2020 press secretary, slammed “Corporate Democrats” and said, “progressives didn’t make this happen.”
Dems ignore corroboration
That kind of anti-establishment rhetoric has continued to build since Biden consolidated the nomination in March — in a stunning comeback that many said had a lot to do with party coordination. However, now that establishment Dems have their nominee, they’re latching on to him for dear life with the motto “vote blue no matter who,” scandals and apparent dementia be damned.
Pelosi endorsed Biden on Monday in a video that did not mention Reade, and so far, most of Biden’s potential VP picks (he has promised to make sure it’s a woman) have not commented on her claim. “I’m proud to endorse Joe Biden for president of the United States because he will be an extraordinary president,” Pelosi said. “He knows how to get the job done.”
.@JoeBiden has fought for our health care, for our families & for our children’s future.
To his work, Joe brings values & integrity. He is a voice of reason & resilience who will fight #ForThePeople. Today, I am proud to endorse him for President of the United States. -NP pic.twitter.com/Qdc9vTgWHP
— Nancy Pelosi (@TeamPelosi) April 27, 2020
“Yass queen, you just knowingly endorsed a rapist,” read one sarcastic reply from a Bernie supporter.
This comes as two more people gave contemporaneous corroborations of Reade’s account to Business Insider. A former neighbor of Reade’s — who says she is voting for Biden anyway — says that she recalls Reade telling her about the assault in the mid-1990s, and a former colleague at a California state senator’s office said that Reade described being retaliated against for “sexual harassment” by a former employer. Reade’s brother and a friend previously corroborated the story, according to The Intercept, while some former co-workers of Reade’s say they have no recollection of it.
How much longer do Democrats think they can keep ignoring this?
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