We are dismayed that the recent claims by a former Senate staffer that Joe Biden inappropriately assaulted her in 1993 seem to have disappeared into the ether.
Biden has been interviewed on several nationally-broadcast interview programs – most recently NBC’s “Meet The Press” and Anderson Cooper’s CNN show– and the subject was never brought up. Moreover, the woman involved says she was turned down for assistance by Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, one of the #MeToo-spawned legal defense funds set up in the aftermath of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation controversy specifically to support efforts by women to pursue difficult-to-prove claims of abuse.
It will be recalled that #MeToo activists were all over Kavanaugh and Senate Republicans during Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination hearings in 2018 after Dr. Christine Blasey Ford claimed that Kavanaugh assaulted her 30 years earlier. They dismissed the apprehensions of The Jewish Press and others that the staleness of the allegations made verifying evidence and pursuing witnesses difficult.
Women, they said, have to be presumptively believed and given the benefit of any doubt. Long established standards of proof have to be loosened because these kind of assaults are almost by definition not perpetrated in public.
We do not advocate the routine dismissal of all stale claims, but we do believe that realistic judgments must be made with the principle that one is innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
The failure of the media to pursue the claim against Biden is all the more curious given Biden’s outspoken and somewhat confusing comments on believing claims of abuse. For example, during the Kavanaugh hearings, Biden 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…. This is true whether or not she forgets facts, whether or not it’s been made worse or better over time.”
Surely this sort of public posture should have drawn close inquiry into the Senate staffer’s allegations, even if with a skeptical eye. But there was none at all.
In the course of the Kavanaugh hearings, it became our firm opinion – shared by many others – that a purely political effort to derail Kavanaugh’s pathway to the Supreme Court was in play. That is, Democrats would do just about anything they could to disgrace Kavanaugh, who was expected to follow the conservative line on key issues that would come before the Court.
In fact, it seemed to us incredible that otherwise intelligent human beings would reject this explanation and were unable to understand what the successful derailment of an academically-superb candidate and respected appellate judge like Kavanaugh on the basis of 30-year-old unproven and unprovable accusations would mean for our governmental processes.
Thus, at the time of the Kavanaugh hearings, we expressed fear that crediting 11th-hour essentially uncorroborated and unverified accusations against Kavanaugh would in the future provide political enemies with a convenient tool with which to upend candidates for political or appointive office.
We take the refusal of the media to raise the intern’s case with Biden as confirmation that politics drove the Kavanaugh dispute. We have long viewed NBC’s Chuck Todd and CNN’s Anderson Cooper as notorious anti-Trumpers, so no surprises there. And a little research about Time Up Legal Defense Fund supports our conclusion, too.
Time Up argues it couldn’t get involved because Biden is in the middle of a political campaign. Taking up the case would violate its status as a nonprofit 501(c)(3) charitable organization that cannot get involved in political activity, it said. But some experts we checked with said this is nonsense. If a 501(c)(3) group has long established neutral criteria governing its activities, it is free to independently apply these criteria to individuals irrespective of their running for political office.
And then there are news reports circulating citing possible past connections between Time Up officials and Democratic politics and Time Up’s connection to a public relations firm “whose managing director…is the top adviser to Biden’s presidential campaign.”
This all certainly sets us thinking about the old axiom: “It all depends on whose ox is gored.”