Douglas Wigdor, the attorney for Tara Reade, told Breitbart News on Friday morning that former Vice President Joe Biden’s claim not to remember her is all the more reason for him to consent to opening up his Senate records.
Biden told MSNBC on Thursday evening that he did not remember Reade, who worked for him as a Senate staffer, and who alleges he sexually assaulted her in 1993. Biden has refused to open his Senate archive, which is housed at the University of Delaware.
Wigdor responded in a telephone interview with Breitbart News.
Biden “hasn’t been that sharp on many things, not least of which now is not recalling Tara Reade,” Wigdor said, “which is all the more reason why now, frankly, he ought to consent to opening up his record at the University of Delaware.”
The former vice president, who is the presumptive Democratic Party nominee for president, has said that he will not consent to his papers being released while he is seeking or serving in public office, because of the risk that information might be taken out of context.
But Wigdor says that Biden’s Senate records could be the key to refreshing his memory and establishing the truth.
“We’re starting to now see, as the attacks change from her being some sort of a Russian sympathizer, to there being no record of her working there, to [writing] bad checks, to now it’s sort of changed — I’ve seen things about work performance and even the clothing that she was wearing,” Wigdor told Breitbart News.
Asked whether the case was “closed,” as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said earlier this month, Wigdor retorted: “The case hasn’t even started.”
He challenged Biden to sit down for an interview with NBC’s Megyn Kelly, as Reade had done, noting that his client had granted multiple interviews.
Asked why other women had not come forward with similar stories, Wigdor replied: “I think a number of women have come forward who have spoken about his hands-on touching, and looks at them, and things like that [that] made them feel very uncomfortable.
“I think that it’s not out of the realm of possibility that someone who’s willing to do those sorts of things, in public, would venture into the next phase of what he did to Tara Reade.”
Wigdor, who also represented some of the victims of convicted Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, added that the way Reade had been treated by the media could deter other women from speaking out.
He noted that he had been an enthusiastic supporter in 2018 of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of assaulting her when they were both in high school in the early 1980s.
MSNBC invited him on the air to discuss the case against Kavanaugh, he said, but when it came to Reade — who, unlike Dr. Ford, had given a contemporaneous account of the assault to a friend who worked for the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) — they did not want to hear from him.
“Somehow now Tara Reade comes into the picture and … the same people are running away from things they have embraced,” he said.
“It’s a complete and utter double standard that’s going on … I can tell you while my phone was ringing off the hook [about] Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing — [MSNBC] couldn’t get enough of me — they haven’t called me once. They don’t want to hear from me.”
Wigdor also noted that many advocacy groups and organizations that rallied around Dr. Ford had failed to defend Reade against “hit pieces” in the media. “I don’t see those same groups rallying for her and the same exact issues.”
He added that Reade would have an “announcement” in the coming days, given that the Democratic National Committee did not want to participate in an “independent, nonpartisan investigation” into the facts.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, is available for pre-order. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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