Now that Tara Reade, a former staffer for former Vice President Joe Biden when he was serving as a senator, has made a sexual assault allegation against him and Democrats and various constituencies are questioning the veracity of Reade’s accusation, an accusation which Biden has denied, it would be instructive to flash back to April 2019, when Biden himself stated on ABC’s “The View” that people “don’t have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt anything” when examining someone for a job interview.
Biden was pressured by Joy Behar of “The View” to apologize to Anita Hill, the woman who attempted to torpedo the 1991 confirmation of conservative bastion Judge Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court by making accusations that were later discredited. Biden was serving as the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman at the time. Biden, who infamously had already been a chief participant in the derailing of conservative Judge Robert Bork when he was nominated by President Ronald Reagan, began by bragging, “I was against Clarence Thomas; I did everything in my power to defeat Clarence Thomas, and he won by the smallest margin anyone ever won going on the Supreme Court.”
After discussing whether he should apologize to Hill, Biden segued to the confirmation hearings for Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, in which women accused Kavanaugh of sexual harassment, stating that the confirmation hearings were a “job interview” and adding, “You don’t have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt anything as to why you shouldn’t put so and so on the Court.”
Behar asked, “You didn’t vote for Clarence Thomas, right?”
Biden boasted, “Not only didn’t vote for Clarence Thomas, I believed her from the beginning. I was against Clarence Thomas; I did everything in my power to defeat Clarence Thomas, and he won by the smallest margin anyone ever won going on the Supreme Court.”
Behar: She (Hill) was not 100% happy with your discussion with her. So here’s your opportunity right now to just say that you apologize, you’re sorry. I think we can clean this up right now.
Biden protested:
By the way, I did; I understand. Look I’m not gonna judge whether or not it was appropriate or whether she thought it was sufficient; but I said privately what I’ve said publicly: I am sorry she was treated the way she was treated; I wish we could have figured out a better way to get this thing done; I did everything in my power to do what I thought was in the rules to be able to stop things but look, take a look at what’s happened: what I did when we got through that God-awful experience she’d been through — she’s one of the reasons why we have the #MeToo movement.
She’s one of the reasons why I was able to finish writing the Violence Against Women Act; she’s one of the reasons why I committed and that was over — there’d never be a Judiciary Committee that I was involved in that didn’t have women on it. So I went out and got a commitment that the women I campaigned for would come on the committee. So she’s responsible for significant changes and she deserves credit for it.
Then he turned to Kavanaugh: “ And one of the things you saw is — how about the last hearing? There’s so much more work to do to figure out — the one important thing that I know is, and if there’s anything in terms of mindset of Supreme Court hearings in those kinds of circumstances: a Supreme Court hearing is not a trial: it’s a job interview. It’s a job interview. And you don’t have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt anything as to why you shouldn’t put so and so on the Court.”
Video below: