Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), one of the loudest champions for Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, slammed Joe Biden accuser Tara Reade on Thursday. Feinstein, who delayed going forward with Ford’s story until Kavanaugh’s confirmation seemed a done deal, raised the exact same questions about Reade that many Kavanaugh defenders raised about Ford.
Feinstein “argued to us that the [Kavanaugh] situation is ‘totally different’ than the Tara Reade allegations against Biden,” CNN Senior Congressional Correspondent Manu Raju reported on Twitter. He proceeded to quote Feinstein:
Kavanaugh “was under the harshest inspection that we give people over a substantial period of time. And I don’t know this person at all who has made the allegations. She came out of nowhere. Where has she been all these years? He was Vice President,” Feinstein said.
The Democrat touted Biden’s record and then added, “to attack him this way to me is absolutely ridiculous.”
“‘Why didn’t she say something — you know when he was Chairman of the Judiciary Committee or after that?’ Feinstein rejected the notion of a Dem double standard and argued the situation isn’t ‘comparable’ to Kavanaugh,” Raju added.
"Why didn't she say something — you know when he was Chairman of the Judiciary Committee or after that?" Feinstein rejected the notion of a Dem double standard and argued the situation isn’t “comparable” to Kavanaugh
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) May 7, 2020
Tara Reade to Joe Biden: ‘You Should Not Be Running on Character’
Feinstein insisted the situations aren’t “comparable,” but she echoed the exact same concerns Kavanaugh defenders about Ford. Like Biden, Kavanaugh had been in the public eye for decades. He served with Ken Starr during the Bill Clinton impeachment battle. He served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Washington, D.C. Circuit for twelve years. Yet Ford only came out with her accusation — that he had sexually assaulted her in the 1980s — in 2018.
Many Democrats have insisted that they know Biden personally and he would never do such a thing, but when more than 200 women testified saying the exact same thing about Kavanaugh, Democrats angrily responded, “Believe All Women!”
In another sense, Feinstein is correct that the claims are not “comparable.” In fact, Tara Reade’s accusation against Biden is already far more credible than Ford’s claim against Kavanaugh. While many of Reade’s former co-workers in Joe Biden’s Senate office did not corroborate Reade’s claims, it seems her mother called in to Larry King Live in 1993, asking for advice on how her daughter should proceed with a scandal featuring a prominent senator. Recently released court documents show that Reade had told the story to her husband at some point before 1996.
By contrast, Ford could not produce any witnesses to back up her claims, and she had no evidence that she had discussed the alleged assault with anyone before 2012 when her attorneys said she had brought it up in a therapy session. Ford’s timeline for the assault also appeared to change in response to Kavanaugh’s releasing his high school calendars. Reade, by contrast, has repeatedly insisted that the alleged assault took place in 1993.
Feinstein’s remarks seem strange for many reasons. Not only did she repeat the concerns of Kavanaugh defenders, but she also insisted that the then-Supreme Court nominee “was under the harshest inspection that we give people over a substantial period of time.” With all due respect, Madame Senator, a Supreme Court confirmation battle pales in comparison to a presidential election. Joe Biden has been running for president for more than a year, and there are still six more months in the campaign. The American people give potential presidents “the harshest inspection … over a substantial period of time.”
As the Daily Caller’s Mary Margaret Olohan pointed out, Feinstein proved one of the loudest voices defending Ford during the Kavanaugh battle. In September 2018, the senator insisted that she found “every single piece of information from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford eminently credible, sincere and believable.”
Yet Donald Trump Jr. rightly rebutted that Feinstein had sat on Ford’s allegations for three months before raising them in an eleventh-hour bid to stop Kavanaugh’s confirmation.
You mean Senator Feinstein who believed Blasey Ford so much that she sat on the accousatuons of serial rape against Brett Kavanaugh for 3 months before bringing them to light?
Yea, she may want to sit this one out and let the lucid people discuss. https://t.co/RhQEfZghEF
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) May 8, 2020
Feinstein asks of Reade, “Where has she been all these years?” Yet Kavanaugh defenders rightly asked the same question of Ford, and now Trump Jr. is asking Feinstein, “Where had you been all those months you sat on the Kavanaugh accusation?”
The #MeToo hypocrisy is strong with this one.
Tyler O’Neil is the author of Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Follow him on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
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