Mika Brzezinski After Biden Interview: Were Democrats Wrong About Believing All Women?

MSNBC Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski on Friday said she still has much admiration for former Vice President Joe Biden after she grilled the presumptive Democrat presidential nominee over allegations of sexual assault against him.

“The interview with @JoeBiden was difficult, having known and greatly respected him for decades. (I still do.),” Brzezinski wrote on social media following the interview.

Brzezinski then questioned whether the trend of believing all women with allegations of sexual assault, regardless of the credibility of their claims, was the correct approach.

“The notion that all women are to be believed, which dominated the Kavanaugh hearings, was revisited. Should it be? Were Democrats wrong THEN or NOW?” she asked.

Biden’s first public remarks on the allegation by a former employee, Tara Reade, come at a critical moment for the presumptive Democrat nominee as he tries to relieve mounting pressure after weeks of leaving denials to his campaign.

“I’m saying unequivocally, it never, never happened,” Biden said in the interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. Biden said he will ask the National Archives to determine whether there is any record of a complaint being filed, as Reade has claimed, but he said repeatedly that he doesn’t believe such a record exists.

Reade did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday. The National Archives also did not immediately reply to an AP inquiry.

“The former staffer has said she filed a complaint back in 1993,” Biden said. “But she does not have a record of this alleged complaint. The papers from my Senate years that I donated to the University of Delaware do not contain personnel files.”

Biden said, “There is only one place a complaint of this kind could be — the National Archives.” The former vice president said “there are so many inconsistencies” in Reade’s various accounts. But Biden said he does not “question her motive.” He said that over his five decades in public life, none of his employees, including Reade, were asked to sign nondisclosure agreements.

“There’s no NDA signed,” Biden said. “No one’s ever signed, I’ve never asked anybody to sign an NDA. There are no NDAs, period, in my case. None.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.