Past remarks made by former Vice President Joe Biden continue to haunt the Democrats’ presumptive White House nominee in the wake of the 1993 sexual-assault allegation made by his former Senate staffer Tara Reade.
The Washington Free Beacon released a montage of prominent Democrats who all argued that the confirmation process for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 was a “job interview” instead of a trial, suggesting that the presumption of innocence did not apply to him when he fought allegations of sexual misconduct.
Included in that montage was Biden from a 2019 interview on “The View,” in which he discussed his treatment of Anita Hill during the 1991 confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, which he headed as the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman. Biden tied it to the Kavanaugh confirmation in the 2019 interview.
“A Supreme Court hearing is not a trial. It’s a job interview. It’s a job interview,” Biden said. “And, you don’t have to prove a reasonable doubt anything as to why you shouldn’t put so and so on the court.”
Last week, remarks he made during a February primary debate resurfaced when he slammed former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg for not releasing female ex-employees from non-disclosure agreements.
“Let’s get something straight here. It’s easy. All the mayor has to do is say, ‘You are released from the non-disclosure agreement. Period,” Biden said in an edited clip preserved on his Twitter account. “This is about transparency from the very beginning. Whether it’s your health records, whether it’s your taxes, whether you have cases against you, whether or not people have signed non-disclosure agreements.”
His shaming of Bloomberg continued, “You think that women, in fact, were ready to say, ‘I don’t want anybody to know about what you did to me.’ That’s not how it works. The way it works is they say, ‘Look, this is what you did to me’ and the mayor comes along and his attorneys say, ‘I will give you this amount of money if you promise you’ll never say anything. That’s how it works.
The tweet, which was made on February 20, also read, “Let me be clear: Mayor Bloomberg should release folks from their non-disclosure agreements. This is about transparency. The American people deserve to know the truth.”
Last week, Biden finally broke his silence about 1993 allegations made by Reade, telling MSNBC on Friday the alleged sexual harassment and assault “never happened.”
During that interview, he was pressed by “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski about his past comment during the Kavanaugh confirmation when he suggested that victims who come forward should be “believed.”
“Women are to be believed, given the benefit of the doubt, if they come forward and say something happened to them,” Biden said. “They should start with the presumption they’re telling the truth. Then, you have to look at the circumstances and the facts, and the facts, in this case, do not exist.”
*story by Fox News