Chris Wallace: Let's face it, Tara Reade's case is a lot stronger than Christine Blasey Ford's was

Yup. Reade has what Blasey Ford did not, a friend who says she told her about the details of the alleged assault within a few years after it happened. If Reade is lying, it’s a lie she’s been sitting on for 25 years. One that’s curiously consistent in its particulars between now and then.

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The president agrees with Wallace’s assessment:

Trump said Biden’s accuser, Tara Reade is “far more convincing” than Christine Blasey Ford, who accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of assult during his Senate confirmation. Biden “could have others come out,” Trump added in an interview Friday on the Dan Bongino Show, a podcast hosted by one of his supporters…

Trump expressed some sympathy for Biden, noting that he has faced accusations of sexual misconduct from nearly a dozen women. He has denied all of the allegations against him. He directed his former fixer Michael Cohen to pay off two women who alleged he had affairs with them before the 2016 election.

“I guess in a way you could say I’m sticking up for him,” Trump said of Biden in his most extensive comments yet on Reade’s accusation.

Is Trump hinting that he has reason to believe there are more accusers waiting in the wings? I think he’s just analogizing based on his own experience.

Kirsten Powers has a column out today reassuring liberal feminists that it’s A-OK to vote for Biden even if he’s guilty (“Trump far outstrips him in the sexual assault accusation department”) and insisting that only a select few Democrats demanded that Kavanaugh’s nomination be withdrawn after Blasey Ford’s accusation. What they wanted, supposedly, was an investigation.

Is that right? Did we hallucinate the cries to “Believe All Women”?

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Democrats didn’t want an investigation. They asked for an investigation because Kavanaugh was hanging by a thread and there was at least a chance it would turn up something truly incriminating that would finish him off. The pause in the confirmation process while an investigation played out also would have created a window for other potential accusers to come forward and pile on, just in case any were out there. The FBI did end up doing some interviews with the relevant players in Blasey Ford’s story and what they produced was so unconvincing that not even the retiring anti-Trumper Jeff Flake could be persuaded to vote against Kavanaugh because of it. If Democrats were sincerely interested in an investigation, the lack of damaging material in the FBI report and the he said/she said nature of Kavanaugh’s and Blasey Ford’s testimony should have led them to grudgingly shift away from demanding he be disqualified. I can’t recall a single liberal of any prominence who did. The “investigation” demands were just a fig leaf so that they could claim they cared about due process even though their minds were made up.

It’s only a job interview, they insisted. Remember? It was much more than that, though; Kavanaugh’s reputation was on the line. But if the job-interview standard is what Democrats want, they’re free to withdraw their offer to Joe Biden of the job as party presidential nominee and offer it to Bernie Sanders instead.

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The sad case of Jennifer Granholm shows how dishonest Democrats are being about this. Here she is today:

“Move on.” And here she was two years ago:

A few days before she sent that tweet Granholm had called for an investigation into the matter — and yet here she was, three days later, insisting that she believed Blasey Ford. How come? If this was all about getting to the truth of what happened, why leap to the conclusion that her testimony was the truth?

And why not demand an investigation of the Joe Biden/Tara Reade now, if investigations are so important? Why does she want to “move on”?

There was no amount of investigation in the Kavanaugh matter that would have satisfied the left unless it led to the outcome they desired. Blasey Ford asked them to go all-in on a story of attempted rape that lacked a date, a location, and any contemporaneous corroboration, the details of which even her close friends couldn’t recall — a story that was essentially unconfirmable — and when liberals couldn’t get out of that box they resorted to insisting that the matter simply hadn’t been looked into sufficiently. They would have held the nomination up forever to pursue it, hoping against hope that Trump would grow impatient and withdraw it instead. Even by the standards of Supreme Court politics, it’s one of the most cynical things we’ll ever see. The bill has now come due.

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Exit quotation from former Obama spokesman Jen Psaki: “stop just stop anyone who is buying into GOP point that there is a double standard with Dr. Ford. Kavanaugh hid behind GOP trying to silence her, @JoeBiden just did an interview and has ordered all records released.” Um, what records, Jen? The ones at the National Archives aren’t under his control. The ones that are, at the University of Delaware, are still locked up nice and tight.

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Ed Morrissey 12:40 PM | November 21, 2024
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David Strom 11:20 AM | November 21, 2024
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