The Daily - Examining the Allegation Against Joe Biden

Episode Date: April 14, 2020

Note: This episode contains descriptions of sexual violence.A former Senate aide to Joseph R. Biden Jr., the prospective Democratic presidential candidate, has accused him of sexually assaulting her in 1993. A Biden spokeswoman said the allegation was false, and people who had worked in Mr. Biden’s office did not recall talk of such an incident. Today, we examine what we know about the allegation, who Ms. Reade spoke to about her experience at the time and what her former colleagues say now. Guest: Lisa Lerer, a reporter at The New York Times who covers campaigns, elections and political power, who spoke with Ms. Reade. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading: Ms. Reade recently filed a report with the Washington, D.C., police, saying she was the victim of a sexual assault in 1993. While not naming Mr. Biden directly, Ms. Reade said the complaint was about him.Last year, Ms. Reade and seven other women came forward to accuse Mr. Biden of kissing, hugging or touching them in ways that made them feel uncomfortable.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is The Daily. Today, a former Senate aide to Joe Biden has accused him of assaulting her in 1993. My colleague, Lisa Lair, examines the allegation. my colleague, Lisa Lair, examines the allegation. It's Tuesday, April 14th. Lisa, when did you begin reporting this story? So about a year ago, we were reporting on allegations from a number of women who came out and said that Joe Biden had touched them in ways that made them feel uncomfortable. Tonight, Joe Biden is facing troubling accusations.

Nevada Democrat Lucy Flores claims the former vice president inappropriately touched and kissed her head before a rally in 2014. Maybe it was a squeeze on the shoulder. Maybe he smelled their hair. Out of nowhere, I feel Joe Biden put his squeeze on the shoulder. Maybe he smelled their hair. Out of nowhere, I feel Joe Biden put his hands on my shoulders, get up very close to me from behind, lean in, smell my hair, and then plant a slow kiss on the top of my head. But this was all happening in public, at campaign rallies, at fundraisers. He put his hands around my head and pulled me in. Former congressional aide Amy Lappos told CBS News Tonight that Joe Biden reached for her face and rubbed noses with her during a fundraiser in Greenwich, Connecticut in 2009.

And, you know, we in the newsroom and in the media were really grappling with how to think and talk about this behavior. This wasn't anything like had normally come up in a lot of these discussions around Me Too, like Harvey Weinstein or any of that. And for the record, I don't believe that it was a bad intention. I'm not in any way suggesting that I felt sexually assaulted or sexually harassed. I felt invaded.

I felt that there was a violation of my personal space. There was no relationship. The women talking about these allegations weren't quite sure what to call it. Some of them said quite vehemently that they didn't consider it sexual harassment, but they wanted the former vice president to be aware of his behavior and how it could make people feel. Others had a slightly different perspective. They thought it was something closer to sexual harassment. So this goes on for really a couple of weeks. And in the end, Biden, he doesn't quite apologize. Today, I want to talk about just as a support and encouragement that I've made to women and some men and made them uncomfortable. But he comes out and he makes

an online video where he says that he has a very touchy-feely kind of political style. In my career, I've always tried to make a human connection. That's my responsibility, I think. I shake hands, I hug people, I grab men and women by the shoulders and say, you can do this. But he recognizes that times have changed and perhaps he needs to change with them and be more respectful of people's space. You know, social norms have begun to change. They've shifted. And the boundaries of protecting personal space have been reset. And I get it.

I get it. I hear what they're saying. I understand it. And I'll be much more mindful. That's my responsibility. My responsibility, and I'll meet it. And then I met Tara Reade. And she had called me with sort of similar kind of story.

Joe Biden had touched her. He'd put his hands in her hair. He touched her shoulders, all in public in ways that really made her feel uncomfortable. But her story had a little bit of a different twist. So she at the time had been working in his Senate office, and this was about, I think, December 1992 to August 1993. She was a low-level staffer, a staff assistant, and she said that the touching had gone beyond just sort of hands in the hair and squeezes of the shoulder, that there had been harassment. She says he had asked her to serve drinks at a

cocktail party. He had commented on her looks in the office in front of other people. And that she felt that he had cultivated a culture in his office that, you know, fostered and permitted this kind of sexual harassment. And what did you do with Reed's story, with that reporting? Well, I talked to her. I talked to her friend who corroborated a lot of what she was telling me. We did use her allegations to call a whole bunch of people who had worked in Joe Biden's office in the 1990s, particularly the early 1990s, which was the period that Tara Reid was working there, to see if they remembered any kind of harassment, what the environment of the office was at the time. But we didn't really come up with anything all that surprising or explosive. Nobody really confirmed her account at that time. So we actually didn't end up reporting them in the paper. We had already reported on a number

of allegations from these women who said that they were uncomfortable with Joe Biden's touching. And we just sort of moved on. And the political world did too. Everyone moved on to the next battle. There was the Mueller report to contend with. And then a really competitive primary presidential debate started. So this issue of the unwanted touching and Tara's story just never came back up. And Lisa, do you think that has something to do with the fact that Biden confronted this,

talked about it, and said he was learning from it? Oh, for sure. But he was really forced into confronting it. I mean, this was a period in March and April before Biden had formally announced his presidential bid, where he was going through the process of reconciling a lot of his record with the current mores of the Democratic Party. He was dealing with his criminal justice record. He was dealing with his positions on abortion and sort of moving to the left with the party. And so I think that quasi-apology video was part of that process. You have a Democratic Party that's acutely aware of issues of racial and gender bias, and Biden had to eventually reconcile those criticisms, whether he felt they were fair or not, with where the party was.

But ultimately, you know, he didn't pay much of a price for it. You know, he announced his campaign a couple, three or so weeks later. His opponents never made an issue of this and everything sort of moved on. Okay, so what happens next? Well, you have the primary race. So Biden, as we all know, nosedives. Then he comes back up. He becomes the frontrunner.

And around that time... Hello, and welcome to The Katie Halper Show. A woman goes on a podcast. Where would you like to start? Where does the story start for you? Well, the story starts when I went to work for Joe Biden. And levels a really serious, serious accusation against Joe Biden, which is basically that he sexually assaulted her. And my body, I was shaking everywhere because it was cold all of a sudden. And I was, I don't know, I felt like I was shaking just everywhere. And I was trying to grasp what had just happened and what I should do. And that woman who tells her story in great detail on this podcast is Tara Reid.

So what are you thinking at this point? Because you had already talked to this woman and she had not mentioned this kind of accusation, right? Well, I must admit, I'm a little confused because it didn't come up at all. And so the first thing I did was pull up my notes. And when I look over my notes and I read the story she had told me a year ago, there's some holes in that story she told me, things that I remember thinking

that her reaction was maybe a bit extreme for what she said she was experiencing in the office at the time that maybe make a little more sense if this other thing had in fact happened, this sexual assault. time around? Was she being truthful now? And also whether I had asked the right questions. Did I miss something because I hadn't called back, because I got caught up with the dynamics of this primary? So at this point, after Tara Reid has gone on this podcast, she has made this claim, and you're trying to figure out why she didn't first tell you that same information. How are you now approaching this story journalistically? So I think we all quickly agreed that it wasn't a question of whether we would approach the story, but how. This was a woman who is making very serious allegations of sexual assault with her name attached publicly against the man who is more than likely to become the Democratic nominee

for president. So we had to grapple with these claims. The question was how. And I think the natural thing to do, really the human thing to do, is to go into a story like this and say, do you believe or not believe the person who's making the accusation? But that's not the journalistic thing to do. We're not judges, we're not the jury,

we're not the police department. I was really focused on what we could show to be true and what we could show to be true and what we could show to not be true, what we had corroboration on and what we didn't have corroboration on, and what kind of facts we could give voters and the American public about this whole incident that's already out in the world and being passed around quite actively on social media. People knew about it, but they didn't know the details and they didn't really know what was true or not. And so where do you begin as you're trying to figure this all out? Well, so the main thing I needed to do was get Tara Reid back on the phone. So that's where I began.

We'll be right back. So Lisa, tell me about this, I guess, second round of communications that you have with Tara Reid after she claims that Joe Biden has assaulted her? So I call her and we start talking every day. And the obvious first question I ask her is why she didn't tell me about these allegations when we talked a year ago. And she tells me that even though they weren't published in the New York Times, they were published in a local paper. And the feedback she got from that being out there, the kind of death threats and harassment online made her reluctant to tell the rest of her story. So we talked through all that. And then eventually I say to her that I need her to tell me the story that she told on that podcast in a way that we can use on the record. And I start recording her. Hello? Hey, can you hear me?

Can you hear me? Yeah, I hear you. Yep, I got you. And what does she say? So where do you want to start? Okay, so let's start with the assault. So the story that I'm about to tell you is all according to Tara Reid. So it's 1993 in the spring sometime,

and she's working as a staff assistant in Joe Biden's Senate office. And one day she's at work and her supervisor comes up to her and has this athletic bag, this gym bag, and asked her if she would find the sender and bring him his gym bag. She just said, take him his gym bag. Hurry. And she was like, he'll meet you. He's down towards the Capitol. So she heads down and finds him somewhere in the Capitol complex of offices. And I ran into him, like I saw him and I, and I, he acknowledged me. He was talking to someone, they walked away. And then he said, come here, Tara. And then he smiled at me, greeted me. She says, hello, Senator. I called him Senator. I didn't call him Joe. And I handed him the bag with my right hand.

I remember that. And the next thing she remembers, he's pinned her up against a wall, which she remembers as being very, very cold. And he's kissing her. It happened at once. And that's what's so hard about telling this story. Like, he's talking to me and his hands are everywhere. And everything's happening at once very quickly.

This happened like in under two minutes. And according to Tara, he reaches his hand under her shirt. She remembers she was wearing a cream colored blouse, grabs her left breast. He used his knee to part my knees because my legs went together and he, and he went kind of like down my skirt. And then as he's like parting my legs with his knee, he like went up and then just like went under. And then, of course, yeah, he was able to do what he did, which was he took, it felt like one or two fingers and inserted them in my vagina. And at that point, he's kissing her and he says to her, she says, do you want to go somewhere else? And he tried, she said, to kiss her on the mouth, but she moves her head.

And then he pulled back because I wasn't responding to him. I wasn't kissing him back. I completely froze up. And he had kind of lifted me up. So I was like up on my, you know, tippy toes almost. And then he looks back at me. And he looks her and he says, according to her, Come on, man. I heard you liked me. And then he smiled. But then when I looked at his eyes, he was angry. And she said she remembers standing there just kind of frozen. And she felt almost a little bad, like she had put him in a bad position.

She was wondering what she did to make him think that, you know, she would be interested in this. And according to Tara, he looked at her and he said, He pointed his finger at me and he just goes, You're nothing to me. And then he looked at me and he goes, nothing. You're nothing to me. Nothing. And she thinks she must have looked a certain way or had a certain expression in her eye because then he kind of took her by the shoulders and patted her shoulders and said, You're okay. You're fine.

And he kind of almost set her down, she said. And then he walked off and walked down the hall. I know I went to the restroom. I know I did to clean up. But I don't remember which restroom I went to in the Russell building or there. I don't know. But I know I did. But my vivid memory next is sitting, I was trying to pull myself together in the back

stairs at the Russell building with those big windows. I remember just sitting on the stairs and nobody was there. And just like my whole body was literally, I couldn't control my shaking. I remember just being so cold, so cold. And then she headed home. She doesn't remember how she got there. She doesn't remember whether she went back into the office and got her bag or talked to anybody. But she made it home to her apartment.

The next thing I remember is being on the phone with my mom and crying and then arguing with her. And her mother tells her in fairly firm language that she needs to immediately file a police report. God, you know, she even swore at me. She was not like being gentle and supportive. And I understand because she wanted me to have evidence. And now I understand what she was trying to do. And I didn't then. But Tara doesn't do that. And does she say why she did not go to the police? Well, what she says is that she basically just wanted the whole thing to go away, is what she told me. That after it happened, she took a shower. She says she threw out all her clothes that she was wearing at the time. I threw everything out, even the shoes, everything. Like, I just, like, that's how I felt

about it. Really? What kind of? She tells me that she called in sick to work, that she was sobbing uncontrollably. It's like, I just didn't want it to have happened. It just didn't happen. And what does she say happens in the days and maybe even weeks after this alleged incident? So she tells me eventually she does go back to work. And when she does, she says that she tells her immediate supervisor, who's Biden's personal secretary, as well as two top staffers in the office, the deputy chief of staff and the chief of staff,

that she feels uncomfortable around Joe Biden. She never mentions the alleged assault, but she talks more about feeling uncomfortable with him touching her shoulders or tangling his hands in her hair. And in her telling, the staff don't really do anything about that. In fact, she feels that they kind of penalize her for bringing that forward. She says they strip her

of one of her duties, which is supervising the interns. She says they put her in a windowless office far from the rest of the staff. So at some point, she says that she goes to a Senate personnel office and files a formal complaint. And what does she say was in this complaint? She said that complaint really detailed the harassment and what she saw as retaliation in the office. But she believes that that form eventually was returned to Biden's office, which would have been a flouting of what the official protocol was at that time. And once that complaint was returned to Biden's office, which would have been a flouting of what the official protocol was at that time. And once that complaint was returned to Biden's office, she says, she was given a month to find a new job and basically eased out of her position. And so she started looking for another position on Capitol Hill, she says, and never ended up getting hired or finding anything.

So Lisa, once Tara Reid has given you this account of an alleged attack, what do you do next? So at this point, she's told me a lot of information and some really detailed information too. So I start thinking about what can be corroborated, what we can show to be true and what we can show to be not true. And one thing that Tara mentions to me

is that at the time she had called a friend and told her the whole story. So I tracked down the friend and, you know, in large part, she corroborates the story that Tara had told me. Tara tells me she also told her mother, her mother is deceased, so she can't be called. And she told a version of her story to her brother, though not all the details. So I start trying to track down her brother. And she tells me she told a friend in 2008, after Jill Biden had been picked as Barack Obama's vice president, she had told a version of the story to that friend without all the details, but that something had happened to her. So I tracked down that friend and she confirms that

account and some of the things that Tara tells me. Where does that leave you? So it leaves us with something, but certainly not enough to corroborate this entire story. We really only have the one friend with the full story and everyone else is just giving us bits and pieces. So that's not the kind of full corroboration that you're looking for as a journalist when you're trying to confirm, you know, really serious allegations and also really politically explosive allegations. But at this point, it's time to turn to the Biden side of things. So along with my colleague, Sydney Ember, we start looking at who we can talk to. And we start by calling the three top staffers in the office at the time that Tara had mentioned she had spoken with and she had raised those complaints of harassment too. All three of them say that a woman named Tara Reid never

approached them with these kind of allegations. And two of them said they didn't remember her at all, even working in the office. So just to be clear, the three people that Tara Reid said she went to and told of Biden's behavior that made her uncomfortable. Pretty senior people in his office. They say they have no recollection of that ever happening. Exactly. They have no recollection. And a lot of the former staffers are mystified by her account, too.

They don't remember anything like this or anything, even the hint of anything like this. So they, when Sidney and I call them, they're trying to reconcile themselves, her story with what they remember from working in that office. A lot of them didn't want to talk on the record. One who did said that at the time you knew who the good guys and bad guys were on the Senate, the places where offices where women would and would not want to work. And she described Biden as one of the good guys. So after that, we reached out to another group of people, which is the interns. And that's because Tara had told me that she supervised the interns and that she shared an office with these interns. So I reached two of them and they both tell me that they never heard of anything, never saw anything like the kind of

harassment and assault Tara had been alleging, but that they did remember midway through their internship, sometime in April, she had been suddenly removed as their boss. And they never knew why, and they never saw her again. So amid all this confusion, I remember that there's one thing that really could cut through all this and clarify exactly what did or did not happen. And that's this complaint that Tara had told me she filed in 1993 with this Senate office and that someone had written down. So we start trying to track down that complaint

and we call the Federal Office of Personnel Management and they tell us to file a freedom of information request, which would take months, if not years. And anyhow, we don't really know exactly what we're asking for because she doesn't remember the name of the office where she filed this complaint. We call over to the Senate and we're able to get some employment records, but not this complaint. So we basically look for this document and come up empty. It's unfindable in the end. What about other aspects of Reed's life that might feel relevant? I mean,

aspects of Reid's life that might feel relevant? I mean, possible political affiliations or motivations. How do you begin to think and report on those? Well, so one thing that we want to be really sure of is that she is who she says she is, and that this isn't someone in the midst of a heated presidential campaign that's only, of course, going to get more heated by all expectations that is trying to push an agenda or possibly pull a fast one on of course, going to get more heated by all expectations, that is trying to push an agenda or possibly pull a fast one on the media to try to get claims that are untrue out there in the public. So I really talked to her a lot about her political affiliation. She describes herself as a third-generation Democrat, but walks me through the fact that she liked Marianne Williamson. She really liked Elizabeth Warren. And

when California voted in the primary over Super Tuesday, she backed Bernie Sanders. But she insists that her motivation for this is not political, even though, you know, I had watched as supporters of Sanders and supporters of President Trump really are the ones pushing this allegation out there on social media and really keeping the drumbeat up for people to investigate it. So that's one concern. And there is this other sort of unusual detail. Which is what? Well, she had written a fair amount in medium posts and on Twitter about her support for Russia and her respect for Vladimir Putin. And so we read through all those medium posts. Some of them had been pulled down off the internet,

but we found them. We looked through those old Twitter posts and we really tried to investigate whether there could be some kind of nefarious agenda there. And she says that she was misguided. Tara Reid says that she had been working on a novel. She's not anymore about Russia and this was all part of her research.

And she says that she doesn't have any respect for Vladimir Putin now, has never been to Russia. So we decide that that's not so disqualifying that it prevents us from putting a version of her story in the paper. So how are you thinking about everything that you have reported at this point? And I assume in consultation with your editors, how are you planning to proceed? Well, one thing we know is that we can't corroborate her story beyond the two friends and her brother. We know we can't find any documents. And we know that everyone who worked for Joe Biden is denying that anything like this ever happened or could have happened. And we also know one other thing,

and this is really important. As far as we've learned in our reporting, there's no pattern of this kind of behavior from Joe Biden. What we had seen a year ago was a very different thing. It was, you know, touching in public, rubbing of shoulders, or maybe touching of hair that made some women feel uncomfortable. This is an allegation of a sexual assault. Those things are not at all similar. And in fact, what Tara Reid is alleging is a fairly singular act as far as we know. But the Democratic Party,

they've really set a very high standard for taking these cases seriously, for taking allegations of sexual abuse seriously. Even Joe Biden has taken a strong position on this. And, you know, it's worth remembering the Kavanaugh hearings. And one thing that Joe Biden said when that was all going on was this. He said, for a woman to come forward in the glaring lights of focus nationally, you've got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she's talking about is real, whether or not she forgets facts, whether or not it's been made worse or better over time. But nobody fails to understand that this is like jumping into a cauldron.

Hmm. So it's Biden himself saying, essentially, believe women. saying, essentially, believe women. That's exactly right. Biden essentially saying believe women. And I think that explains part of the approach to these allegations that you've seen from his campaign. Joe Biden himself has not spoken about them at all. And I don't think he's been asked directly, although I suppose that could come.

But his campaign has been very careful in all their public statements to say that they believe women, that they think coming out like this is a credible thing to do. But in this case, they say the allegations are false. But they're really walking a tightrope when they talk about this politically with many in the base of the Democratic Party. Well, help me understand that. I mean, with all that history in mind that you just described of the Democratic Party setting such a high standard for itself, and Biden himself, the presumptive Democratic nominee, saying believe women, how is the Democratic establishment, how is the Democratic Party responding to what Tara Reid has alleged happened to her? They're not responding. Nobody in the Democratic establishment, elected officials, party leaders has discussed this at all. Why do you think that is? I mean, is that

a function of the conflicting information here? Is that party loyalty to the de facto nominee? Is that about the fact that there is just one of these accusations, not a pattern, as you just said? How do you explain that? Well, honestly, I think it's some of all of that. When I talk to people who are close to Joe Biden, and I've now talked to quite a lot of them, they say that this is something that's just so completely out of character for him. They describe a man who's fiercely devoted to his wife and his kids, that he would spend a lot of time focusing on when he could get the quickest train, the soonest train home to Delaware so he could see them. And they just cannot reconcile these allegations that are out with the guy that they have known for all these decades. So they say they can't believe it's true. But when you look at the political calendar,

we're in the spring of an election year. Joe Biden is going to be the Democratic nominee. So you have to figure that many, many Democrats also just don't want this to be true. Lisa, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. So today I am asking all Americans, I'm asking every Democrat, I'm asking every independent, I'm asking a lot of Republicans to come together in this campaign to support your candidacy, which I endorse. On Monday, Joe Biden was endorsed by his former rival, Senator Bernie Sanders.

Well, Bernie, I want to thank you for that. It's a big deal. I think that your endorsement means a great deal. It means a great deal to me. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. French people, my dear compatriots, we are living through difficult times. On Monday, France said it would extend a nationwide lockdown until the middle of May. Britain was expected to extend its lockdown.

And Russia's president offered his darkest assessment yet of the virus's impact there. We see that the situation is changing almost every day, and unfortunately, not in the best direction. During a meeting with his advisers, Vladimir Putin said, quote, We see the situation changing daily, and unfortunately, not for the better. Thank you very much. Good afternoon to everyone. Let me welcome my fellow governors who are on the telephone, who you'll hear from in a moment. In the U.S., two groups of governors, one on the East Coast, the other on the West Coast,

said they would decide regionally when and how to reopen their states' economies, and emphasized that they would not do so until experts and data showed that it would be safe. Again, we anticipate different facts, different circumstances for different states, different parts of states, but let's be smart and let's be cooperative and let's learn from one another. During a conference call, the governors, including Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania, During a conference call, the governors, including Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania, said that it was their role, not the federal government's, to make that decision. Well, seeing as how we had the responsibility for closing the state down, I think we probably have the primary responsibility for opening it up. A few hours later, President Trump was asked about the governor's announcement. President Trump was asked about the governor's announcement. Just to clarify your understanding of your authority vis-a-vis governors.

If a governor issued a state home order... When you say my authority, the president's authority. Never mind, because it's not me. This is, when somebody's the president of the United States, the authority is total. And that's the way it's got to be. The president insisted that the decision was his. Your authority is total. And that's the way it's got to be. The president insisted that the decision was his. It's total. It's total. And the governor's no good. The governor's no good.

Now you have a couple of bands of... That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.