2020 US Presidential Election

[PorkChopSandwiches]

via Gfycat

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[Muddy]

Disgusting.

[lost in melb.]

[Pony]

That's disgusting! He should show some class and grope little kids instead like his rival.

[lost in melb.]

It's hard when you guys are so sensitive

[Pony]

It's hard when you guys are so sensitive

That's a cute pic, surprised you didn't post the one of his daughter bouncing to the music on his knee.

[Teh One Who Knocks]

https://www.draftmichelle.org

[DemonGeminiX]

[DemonGeminiX]

[Teh One Who Knocks]

[Teh One Who Knocks]

By Joseph A. Wulfsohn | Fox News




Former Vice President Joe Biden had gone over a month without addressing the explosive sexual assault allegation made by his former Senate staffer Tara Reade, but he had quite a different tune during one of the Democratic debates earlier this year.

Back in February, during former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's underwhelming run for president, the billionaire businessman was pummelled by his competitors over not releasing former female employees from their non-disclosure agreements (NDA).

And while Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is remembered for her fierce line of attacks at the two debates with Bloomberg, Biden also squeezed in some punches of his own.

"Let's get something straight here. It's easy. All the mayor has to do is say, 'You are released from the non-disclosure agreement. Period," Biden said in an edited clip preserved on his Twitter account. "This is about transparency from the very beginning. Whether it's your health records, whether it's your taxes, whether you have cases against you, whether or not people have signed non-disclosure agreements."

His shaming of Bloomberg continued, "You think that women, in fact, were ready to say, 'I don't want anybody to know about what you did to me.' That's not how it works. The way it works is they say, 'Look, this is what you did to me' and the mayor comes along and his attorneys say, 'I will give you this amount of money if you promise you'll never say anything. That's how it works.

The tweet, which was made on February 20, also read, "Let me be clear: Mayor Bloomberg should release folks from their non-disclosure agreements. This is about transparency. The American people deserve to know the truth."

Biden has been criticized for lack of transparency. The presumptive Democratic nominee is set to break his silence on Friday.

There have also been growing calls for him to unseal his Senate records that are being held at the University of Delaware, where Reade believes her sexual harassment complaint she filed to the Senate personnel office is being held and further corroborate her claims.

However, the university says the records will remain sealed until at least two years after Biden leaves public life.

"I'm calling for the release of the documents being held by the University of Delaware that contain Biden's staff personnel records because I believe it will have my complaint form, as well as my separation letter and other documents," Reade has told Fox News. "Maybe if other staffers that have tried to file complaints would come to light -- why are they under seal? And why won't they be released to the public?"

The editorial board of The Washington Post joined that call, urging Biden on Wednesday to address the allegations and "release relevant records."

Biden is set to address the allegations for the first time on Friday. It is unknown if he will be asked whether he would be willing to unseal his Senate records.

His campaign has denied Reade's allegations.

[Teh One Who Knocks]

By Paul Bois - The Daily Wire




An op-ed in the New York Times has called on the Democrats to go with a plan B, namely, dump former Vice President Joe Biden while they still can and run another candidate to take on President Trump in November due to the sexual assault allegation from Tara Reade.

Written by Elizabeth Bruenig, the piece fairly lays out both the pros and cons in Tara Reade’s accusation against Biden before concluding that Reade’s account is just too credible for the Democrats to ignore without seriously harming the agenda they set when Christine Blasey Ford accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault. Though the author doesn’t outright believe Tara Reade, she does admit that arguments against her credibility are shoddy at best.

“Ms. Reade’s account is not nearly as incredible as some have argued,” writes Bruenig. “In the course of my reporting, I have worked closely with many survivors of sexual assault. It isn’t unusual, in my experience, for survivors to exhibit behavior that seems unstable or erratic to others. They may initially disclose to investigators or journalists only a fragment of what happened, and then reveal more over time — some even falsely recant, either because they sense the police don’t believe them, or because they fear the consequences of pressing their claims. And victims often maintain relationships with their attackers or harbor mixed feelings about them.”

Scott Berkowitz, the founder and president of the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), added that “it’s not at all uncommon for someone to still have positive feelings about aspects of the person who assaulted them, or to admire or respect them. With people who work for politicians, there’s usually a strong measure of loyalty or respect in that relationship. So it’s not indicative that someone wasn’t telling the truth.”

With that in mind, Bruenig gets to what’s really at stake for the Democrats if they continue to brush off Tara Reade: complete and total loss of the moral high ground.

“Conservatives, like my colleague Bret Stephens, can see the plain gulf between how Democrats have approached sexual assault in politically advantageous cases versus Ms. Reade’s, and the evident hypocrisy threatens to discredit the entire enterprise,” writes Bruenig.

Fearing this loss, other feminists have quickly changed their tune and come to the support of Tara Reade, such as Jessica Valenti and Rebecca Traister. Even the Planned Parenthood Action Fund has called for further investigation into the matter. However, even a thorough investigation, argues Bruenig, will not be enough to sway the doubt that already lingers in people’s minds. In the end, Biden will be a credibly accused candidate going up against President Trump in the general election; that just simply will not do the situation justice, according to her.

“It is also possible that this won’t just go away, and that it will demoralize voters and place Mr. Biden at a disadvantage against Mr. Trump in the general election, despite the fact that Mr. Trump has a damning list of accusers alleging sexual offenses,” writes Bruenig. “For a candidate mainly favored for his presumed electability and the perception of empathy and decency, that’s a serious liability.”

In order to “preserve the strides made on behalf of victims of sexual assault in the era of #MeToo” and give themselves the best chance of winning, the Democrat need to dump Biden, she concludes.

[lost in melb.]

I would take her accusations more seriously if she didn't come across as such a f****** whack job

[DemonGeminiX]

I would take her accusations more seriously if Biden was a Republican

[Teh One Who Knocks]

By Tyler Olson | Fox News


Four days after presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden made a public request for the secretary of the Senate to search through records from 1993 for a purported complaint by the woman accusing him of sexual assault, the official has made clear that nothing short of a change in the law can allow the public -- or anyone -- to access them.

Biden denies the alleged assault and has challenged whether the complaint Tara Reade says she filed even exists.

His call for records to be released was an apparent attempt to clear the air -- but the situation remains as murky as ever.

After Senate Secretary Julie Adams issued a statement Monday saying that "the Secretary has no discretion to disclose" the information or records that Biden asked for -- specifically a complaint the former Senate staffer says she filed with what at the time would have most likely been the Office of Fair Employment Practices -- she responded to further queries from Biden.

In short, she said she can't even confirm if the records exist, and not even those involved in original complaints from the time can see them.

"The Secretary's Office was advised by Senate Legal Counsel that disclosing the existence of such specific records would amount to a prohibited disclosure under the Government Employee Rights Act of 1991. Furthermore, we are not aware of any exceptions in law authorizing our office to disclose any such records that do exist, if any, even to original participants in a matter," the secretary's office said.

Further, the University of Delaware -- which has additional Senate records that Biden insists are irrelevant to the allegations at hand -- told Fox News on Tuesday that those files are closed to the public for now absent Biden's "express consent."

Adams, in her statement, was responding to questions from the Biden campaign on whether the mere existence of such records was allowed to be disclosed, if there is anyone to whom that existence could be lawfully disclosed and if it could release the processing procedures applying to such complaints.

The office did release the procedures in place for the Office of Fair Employment Practices in 1993, which said an employee would have had to first submit a request for counseling, complete it, and then pursue “mediation” before filing a formal complaint. That process, under the procedures, is confidential. The Associated Press reported that Reade said in an interview she “chickened out” on filing full harassment or assault allegations – but Reade later told Fox News that she filed some kind of “complaint.”

So the procedures leave unclear whether this document would exist.

The Office of Fair Employment Practices procedures also included strict confidentiality provisions, though, as Adams said, the Government Employee Rights Act of 1991 is the law preventing her from assisting Biden on his search for Reade's alleged complaint.

Adams has not denied that the complaint might exist or that it could be at the National Archives, as Biden has previously said. She has said that she legally would not be able to release the complaint or acknowledge its existence.

Senate Rules for Office of ... by Fox News on Scribd

This apparent brick wall in the search for records comes as the University of Delaware doubled down in a statement Tuesday on its refusal to make any information about Biden's senatorial papers, which are housed at the university, public without Biden's permission.

"Vice President Biden donated his Senatorial papers to the University of Delaware pursuant to an agreement that prohibits the University from providing public access to those papers until they have been properly processed and archived. The University is bound by, and will comply with, the agreement. Until the archival process is complete and the collection is opened to the public, access is only available with Vice President Biden's consent," a spokesperson for the school said.

"Vice President Biden and his designees have access, under supervision of staff from the Unversity's Special Collections unit, to materials during the process. No Biden designee has visited the collection since November 2019. No documents have been added or removed by any Biden designees during any visits," the statement continued. "The donor agreement is not a public document; this is standard university practice for all donor agreements."

The school also reiterated that because documents have not been digitized, "there is no systematic way to search the archive as has been suggested."

The school, however, confirmed to Fox News last week that it technically owns the documents. It has changed the terms of when it would release the papers to the public before.

The university initially said it expected to make the records “available to the public two years after Biden’s last day in elected public office.” In April 2019, just hours before Biden announced his current presidential bid, the university changed its timeline, and said the papers wouldn't be released until either Dec. 31, 2019 or until two years after Biden “retires from public life,” whichever comes later.

Biden, in an interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Friday, resisted calls from the show's hosts to provide access to the documents at the University of Delaware, saying they contained sensitive details of conversations he had with presidents, foreign leaders and other information that could unfairly be used as "fodder" against his presidential campaign.

Whether documents under the control of the University of Delaware and the U.S. Senate ever see the light of day or not, Biden continues to deny that he sexually assaulted Reade.

"No. It is not true. I’m saying unequivocally it never, never happened, and it didn’t. It never happened," Biden said in the "Morning Joe" interview.

He continued, addressing the alleged complaint, specifically.

"I’m confident there’s nothing," Biden said, before addressing his request for a search of Senate documents supposedly held by the National Archives. "If there is a complaint, that’s where it would be. That’s where it’d be filed, and if it’s there, put it out, but I’ve never seen it. No one has that I’m aware of."

Reade initially accused Biden of inappropriate touching last year, as several other women did. But she told a far more graphic version of her story in late March to The Intercept and to podcast host Katie Halper, which raised the level of the accusation to sexual assault.

Biden's campaign adamantly denied the allegation, as did former aides in his Senate office. He has also received general support from Democrats, particularly those who are possible vice presidential picks. But it took over a month for the candidate to address the allegation directly, which he did on Friday.

Reade, who was a supporter of Biden's opponent Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primary, has had several associates back her story, saying she told them about the alleged assault years ago. Additionally, last month a clip from "Larry King Live" in August 1993 resurfaced in which a woman, who Reade claims is her mother, speaks about problems her daughter had with a prominent senator, saying she has a story to tell but opted not to go to the press out of respect for her former boss.

The woman in the call does not mention Biden or sexual assault, but the timing fits with when Reade says she was forced out of her job following the alleged assault.