Tara Reade, who was all but canceled nearly a year ago, is suddenly back in the public eye, and for that she may have New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to thank.
With Mr. Cuomo on the ropes over sexual harassment allegations by former aides, Ms. Reade’s accusation that President Biden sexually assaulted her while she worked on his Senate staff is coming back to haunt Democrats fighting to squelch the party’s latest MeToo moment.
As far as Ms. Reade is concerned, the parallels between the Biden and Cuomo situations may be why Democratic leaders in the New York state Legislature are stiff-arming calls by liberals and Republicans to impeach the two-term governor.
“I think, too, it has to do with the fact that if they investigate Cuomo, they’re going to have to investigate Biden. And I’m here,” Ms. Reade said in a Zoom-style discussion Tuesday with Green Party leaders Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker.
“And I said that I would go under oath if they would do a congressional investigation into Biden,” Ms. Reade said. “So I think that there’s enough talk going on with the power elites, and I also think that they’re arguing, because Cuomo’s people are probably saying to Biden’s people, ‘Hey, you all circled the wagons for Biden, now circle the wagon for me.’”
Mr. Cuomo has denied the harassment claims made by a half-dozen women, most of them former staffers. After Ms. Reade’s accusation about a 1993 encounter went public last year, Mr. Biden emphatically rejected it, saying the incident “never, never happened.”
Even so, critics were quick to revisit the past after the president sympathized Tuesday with the Cuomo accusers, telling ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that “a woman should be presumed telling the truth and should not be scapegoated and become victimized by her coming forward.”
