Top House Dem, WaPo editorial board call on Joe Biden to address sexual assault allegation
Pressure is mounting from the left for the Democratic presidential candidate to stop ignoring Tara Reade's claims
House Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) and The Washington Post editorial board on Wednesday joined a rising number of voices from the left calling on presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to address the sexual assault allegation brought against him by a former Senate aide.
What are the details?
Fox News reported that Jeffries was asked during an interview with WNYC-AM about the accusations of Tara Reade, a former Biden staffer who says the former vice president assaulted her while he was still a senator in 1993.
Jeffries told the outlet, "It's got to be taken seriously because this is a serious allegation raised by a serious individual and needs to be investigated seriously. We've probably got to hear from him [Biden] at some point directly."
The same day, The Washington Post editorial board published an op-ed saying that Biden should not only "address the Tara Reade allegations himself," but release the records from his 36-year Senate career, as Reade has requested.
The Post wrote that "Tara Reade deserves to be heard, and voters deserve to hear her. They deserve to hear from Joe Biden, too."
The editorial board argued that releasing the records may or may not confirm whether Reade made a complaint against Biden at the time of the alleged incident, but that doing so "signals only a desire for the public to know all that's able to be known, which ought to be in everyone's interest."
Biden remains silent
Biden himself has remained silent about the allegation from Reade, which became public last month. Despite numerous televised media interviews since the sexual assault claim came to light, not one reporter has asked Biden about the allegations.
The Biden campaign has adamantly denied that the assault ever happened, and has tried to claim a report from The New York Times proves as much.
But the campaign was hit with an embarrassing correction by The Times on Wednesday, when a spokesperson for the newspaper told The Washington Examiner that its "investigation made no conclusion either way," and that the campaign's claim was inaccurate.
