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Judge Lifts Restraining Order On Mary Trump, Freeing Her To Promote Tell-All Book About Family
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The post Trump in Fox News interview to accuse Biden of taking drugs appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>
Fox News will broadcast an interview on Saturday night in which Donald Trump accuses Joe Biden of taking performance-enhancing drugs.
“I think there’s probably – possibly – drugs involved,” Trump told Jeanine Pirro, in a released excerpt. “That’s what I hear. I mean, there’s possibly drugs. I don’t know how you can go from being so bad where you can’t even get out a sentence…”
Trump did not finish his own sentence, but he went on to say he was referring to the Democratic presidential nominee’s hesitant performances in early primary debates, before his surge to victory on the back of a win in South Carolina.
“You saw some of those debates with the large number of people on the stage,” Trump said. “He was, I mean, I used to say, ‘How is it possible that he can go forward?”
According to the president, Biden won the nomination because the progressive vote was split.
“And he only won because Elizabeth Warren didn’t drop out,” he said. “Had she dropped out Bernie [Sanders] would’ve won Super Tuesday, every state, and you would’ve had Bernie instead of Biden.”
Trump’s claim came not long after his oldest son, Donald Trump Jr, denied claims he used cocaine before speaking at the Republican convention. Remarkably enough, it was also not the first time Trump, 74, has accused Biden, 77, of taking drugs.
Speaking to the Washington Examiner last month, the president said: “We’re going to call for a drug test, by the way, because his best performance was against Bernie [in the final debate].
“It wasn’t that he was Winston Churchill because he wasn’t, but it was a normal, boring debate. You know, nothing amazing happened. And we are going to call for a drug test because there’s no way – you can’t do that.”
This week, Trump claimed to have been channeling Churchill when he chose not to tell the public what he knew about the coronavirus threat. The claim met with ridicule.
Asked by the Examiner if he was comparing the debates to a boxing match, before which fighters are tested for banned substances, Trump said: “Well, it is a prizefight.
“It’s no different from the gladiators, except we have to use our brain and our mouth. And our body to stand. I want all standing. They want to sit down.”
Famously, Trump towered over Hillary Clinton during a debate in St Louis in October 2016, following his opponent round the stage. He also challenged Clinton to take a drugs test before their last debate because, he said, she had been “getting pumped up” before coming out to face him. She declined.
Trump and Biden are due to debate in Cleveland on 29 September, in Miami on 15 October and in Nashville on 22 October. Vice-presidential nominees Mike Pence and Kamala Harris will meet in Salt Lake City on 7 October.
Biden did not immediately respond to Trump’s remarks to Fox News.
Trump is famously teetotal and disapproving of drug use but his political rise has been fueled by a well-documented love for Diet Coke and junk food.
Beset by speculation about his physical and cognitive health, earlier this month the president was moved to deny rumours that a “series of ministrokes” prompted a short-notice visit to hospital in Washington last November.
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The post Trump in Fox News interview to accuse Biden of taking drugs appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>The post ABC News Lands Interview With Mary Trump About New Tell-All Book appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>UPDATE: In the first excerpts of her interview with ABC News, Mary Trump recalled visiting the Oval Office just a few months after her uncle, Donald Trump, took office.
“He already seemed very strained by the pressures … and I just remember thinking, ‘He seems tired. He seems like this is not what he signed up for,’” she said.
She said that Trump was “utterly incapable of leading this country,” and that it was even “dangerous” for him to do so.
George Stephanopoulos asked her, “If you’re in the Oval Office today, what would you say to him?” She responded, “Resign.”
PREVIOUSLY, 12:49 PM PT: ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos sat down with Mary Trump, the president’s niece, on Tuesday for what is being billed as an exclusive interview about her new tell-all book.
The interview will air on Good Morning America on Wednesday, the network said, and on other news shows.
On Monday, a New York judge lifted a restraining order that prevented Trump from discussing Too Much And Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man. The president’s brother, Robert Trump, had sought to halt publication of the book, claiming that she was barred from discussing the family as part of a settlement agreement of the estate of Fred Trump Sr., the family patriarch.
The book was released by Simon & Schuster on Tuesday.
In the New York case, Judge Hal Greenwald rejected Robert Trump’s argument that the settlement’s confidentiality clause included never discussing the family. He wrote that “what was confidential was the financial aspect of the Agreement, which may not be so interesting now as it might have been in 2001. On the other hand the non-confidential part of the Agreement, the Trump family relationships may be more interesting now in 2020 with a presidential election on the horizon.”
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]]>The post Bolton, in FNC interview, calls Trump’s coronavirus response ‘incoherent’ appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>Former National Security Adviser John Bolton, in an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier, blasted President Trump’s coronavirus response as “incoherent” as he tore into what he labeled the unpredictable nature of the president’s decision-making.
“The difference between [Joe] Biden and Trump is that Biden has a view, and Trump has no view,” Bolton said, when asked who would be better on foreign policy. “On any given day, any decision is possible. And I find that frightening. I find the response to the coronavirus demonstrates exactly the kind of fear that I have.”
WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW TONIGHT AT 6PM ET ON FNC’S ‘SPECIAL REPORT WITH BRET BAIER’
Bolton continued, saying that “the response was herky-jerky, incoherent, sporadic and not as effective as it could have been.” He then warned that this “only gives a preview of what could happen in an even more severe crisis.”
The interview, airing Tuesday at 6 p.m. ET on Fox News’ “Special Report with Bret Baier,” comes as Bolton’s tell-all memoir “The Room Where It Happened,” is released to the public.
In the book, Bolton reveals sensitive details of his time in the Trump administration and levels damning accusations against the president, including that he allegedly asked China to help him get reelected and wanted to intervene in an investigation of a Turkish-owned bank.
Despite those allegations, however, Bolton said he does not regret his time in the White House.
“I did the best I could and, given the opportunity, I would do it again,” he said. “I’m sure I made a lot of mistakes, I have no doubt of that. I wish I could correct them in retrospect. But I think the kind of security for America that I advocate, it’s the mainstream of the Republican Party, and my disappointment is that Trump is so far outside.”
CLICK HERE FOR THE FOX NEWS APP
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo criticized Bolton over the book in a recent “Hannity” interview, going so far as to compare him to intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden. Bolton disagreed, but did not appear to put much stock in the remark because, he says, Pompeo has made a habit of going along with the president:
“That’s complete nonsense, but on the other hand the president was quoted months ago calling me a traitor, so the fact Pompeo does is par for his course.”
For his part, Trump has railed against Bolton and said he should face jail time for allegedly including classified material in his book — something Bolton denies.
“Washed up Creepster John Bolton is a lowlife who should be in jail, money seized, for disseminating, for profit, highly Classified information,” Trump tweeted early Tuesday. “Remember what they did to the young submarine sailor, but did nothing to Crooked Hillary. I ended up pardoning him – It wasn’t fair!”
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]]>The post Bolton, in interview, says Democrats ‘almost as bad and somewhat equivalent to Trump’ appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>Former national security adviser John Bolton warned in an interview airing Sunday night that President Trump’s White House poses a “danger for the republic” — but cautioned that congressional Democrats were “almost as bad” in their efforts to unseat him from office, which Bolton called a “partisan catfight.”
Speaking to ABC News’ Martha Raddatz, Bolton further broadened his attacks beyond just the president, accusing the Defense Department of “obstruction” concerning the administration’s response to suspected chemical weapons use in Syria.
The interview aired just days after a federal judge determined that Bolton’s decision to publish his upcoming tell-all memoir on the Trump administration had “exposed his country to harm and himself to civil (and potentially criminal) liability,” and that Bolton had “likely jeopardized national security by disclosing classified information in violation of his nondisclosure agreement obligations.”
“There really isn’t any guiding principle that I was able to discern other than what’s good for Donald Trump’s reelection,” Bolton told Raddatz.
SCHIFF SUGGESTS MORE IMPEACHMENT ON THE TABLE — AS JUDGE WARNS BOLTON IS IN JEOPARDY
He added: “The very first thing that I encountered on my opening day was, of course, the chemical-weapons attack by the Syrian government against innocent civilians in Syria. We responded by the end of the week. But, I have to say, it was a very disappointing process we went through. I felt there was obstruction from the Defense Department.”
Specifically, Bolton said, “what we thought we should get from the Defense Department was a series of heavy, medium and light options for the president to choose from. We got, instead, a series of options that were apples and oranges.”
No deterrent against chemical weapons use was established, Bolton complained. Trump, Bolton charged, didn’t understand the “implications of what he was doing.”
The president contributed to this lack of information, according to Bolton, by failing to speak up during intelligence briefings.
“It’d be interesting if somebody could do a statistical analysis at the end of the administration, total time in intelligence briefings, what percentage of that time did the president speak, and what time did the intelligence briefers speak. I would love to see that statistic, because it’s gonna be pretty close to 50/50, which is unusual, to say the least,” Bolton said.
Hours earlier, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that although he hasn’t read Bolton’s book, “The Room Where It Happened,” his committee would be looking in coming days at having Bolton testify. Schiff suggested Trump could be impeached once again.
Speaking to Raddatz, Bolton again hammered Schiff and Democrats for failing to broaden their investigation into Trump during the impeachment.
“I was fully prepared — if I got a subpoena like everybody else who testified got a subpoena,” Bolton said. “I think the way the House advocates of impeachment proceeded was badly wrong. I think it was impeachment malpractice. I think they were determined because of their own political objectives to conduct an impeachment proceeding that was very narrowly focused on Ukraine, and that went very, very quickly.”
Bolton said Democrats were hasty because “they didn’t wanna mess up the Democratic presidential nomination.”
“Now, I find that conduct almost as bad and somewhat equivalent to Trump,” Bolton charged, “that they’re torquing one of the gravest constitutional responsibilities the House of Representatives has, the power of impeachment, around their presidential nomination schedule. And, they failed utterly to accomplish what they wanted. In fact, they made things worse, because their strategy fitted with the Trump political strategy. Keep it narrow, and move it fast. So, what did they do? The House advocates said, ‘We have proven Trump is impeached forever, and that he’d learn a lesson from it.'”
Democrats’ unsubstantiated charges that the Trump campaign had conspired with Russia, Bolton said, were little more than crass politics.
“Fundamentally, the pursuit of the Russia collusion issue was, I think, for many Democrats, an effort to delegitimize the Trump presidency,” Bolton charged.
FOX NEWS OBTAINS BOLTON’S BOOK — HERE’S THE KEY FINDINGS
Schiff and others, he added, were seeking to use him as a scapegoat.
“I think the House Democrats built a cliff, they threw themselves off of it,” Bolton remarked. “Halfway down, they looked up and saw me, and said, “Hey, why don’t you come along?”
Schiff shot back after the interview aired: “Tonight, Bolton was pressed on why he didn’t come forward and testify, instead saving it for a book. Bolton insisted it wasn’t about the cash. Well, to quote Dale Bumpers during a different impeachment: ‘When you hear somebody say, ‘This is not about money,’ it’s about money.”
Asked whom he will vote for, Bolton responded: “certainly not” Joe Biden or Trump.
“I’m gonna figure out a conservative Republican to write in,” he said.
Republicans have accused Bolton of lying. Trump rival Joe Biden, meanwhile, tweeted that “if John Bolton’s accounts are true … it’s not only morally repugnant, it’s a violation of Donald Trump’s sacred duty to the American people to protect America’s interests and defend our values.”
However, Biden hasn’t always had a positive view of Bolton’s credibility; videos resurfaced on social media last week showing Biden seemingly slamming Bolton as a liar.
“Well, I don’t want my lawyer and I don’t want any lawyer saying something to help my case by lying, deliberately lying about my opponent,” Biden says in one clip.
Then-Sen. Barack Obama, in 2005, echoed those arguments, calling Bolton “damaged goods,” and saying his appointment as ambassador meant “we will have less credibility and ironically be less equipped to reform the United Nations in the way that it needs to be reformed.”
READ A BROADCAST TRANSRIPT OF BOLTON INTERVIEW ON ABC
Bolton himself had admitted in the past that he would be more than willing to lie if he felt it was in the nation’s best interest.
“If I had to say something I knew was false to protect American national security, I would do it,” Bolton said in an interview with Fox Business in 2010.
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]]>The post Barr, in FNC interview, confirms ‘focused investigations’ of Antifa, hammers ‘dangerous’ push to defund police appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>Speaking exclusively to Fox News’ Bret Baier on Monday outside the Department of Justice, Attorney General Bill Barr confirmed that “focused investigations” are underway that “relate to Antifa,” the far-left group that President Trump has sought to designate as a terrorist organization.
“It’s a very loosely organized group, and they have an unusual system of communication and organization,” Barr said. “There are people who can be characterized as leaders in any given situation.”
Also in the wide-ranging interview, Barr harshly criticized efforts to defund police departments, argued that some jurisdictions had gone too far in their coronavirus lockdown restrictions, and defended the U.S. Park Police’s decision to clear Lafayette Park ahead of a visit by the president — a move that came, Barr told Baier, after the attorney general himself was targeted with rocks and other projectiles.
Determining who is behind the protests has become a top priority for the DOJ, and a political football in the meantime. Former national security adviser Susan Rice has claimed “the Russians” could be involved; Minnesota officials have blamed out-of-state white supremacists, despite evidence showing that arrested individuals are overwhelmingly local.
DEMS WHO ENFORCED STRICT CORONAVIRUS LOCKDOWNS ARE NOW OKAY WITH ‘BLACK LIVES MATTER’ PROTESTS
Thousands of people demonstrate in Cologne, Germany, Saturday June 6, 2020, to protest against racism and the recent killing of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis, USA. His death has led to Black Lives Matter protests in many countries and across the US. A US police officer has been charged with the death of George Floyd. (AP Photo/Martin Meissner)
Fox News reported last week that federal law enforcement officials are probing whether “criminal actors” are coordinating violent activities during protests over the in-custody death of George Floyd, and are looking into reports that “rocks and bricks” have been dropped off to throw at police.
“There appear to be sources of funding, and we are looking into the sources of funding,” Barr said. “And, you know, there is clearly some high degree of organization involved at some of these events and and coordinated tactics that we’re seeing. And we’re looking into that as well. And some of it relates to an Antifa. Some of it relates to groups that act very much like Antifa. As I said, there’s a witches’ brew of extremist groups that are trying to exploit this situation on all sides.”
PARK POLICE WALKS BACK TEAR-GAS DENIAL
“There’s a witches’ brew of extremist groups looking to exploit this on all sides.”
— Attorney General Bill Barr
Protests near the White House, Barr observed, had become so violent that the Secret Service moved Trump to the bunker underneath the White House. The mayhem, which also included the burning of St. John’s Church and the harassment and assault of a Fox News reporter, necessitated action, Barr said — even though some media organizations have said Lafayette Park was cleared solely for Trump’s “photo-op” near the church.
“The image has somewhat been mis-created, in the sense that I haven’t seen any videos on TV of all the violence that was happening preceding that,” Barr said. “I personally saw projectiles thrown, and two were thrown at me and the police officers there. And my security detail made me move back because they said that projectiles had been landing in a certain area — things like rocks, bottles were thrown at me.”
TRUMP RALLIES TO RESUME ; SECRET SERVICE RUSHES TRUMP TO BUNKER AS AGENTS HIT, CAR BOMBS FEARED
Barr reiterated that the move to clear the park and move the White House perimeter out one block was the right one.
“As I’ve said, the president of the United States should be able to walk one block from the White House out to the ‘church of presidents,'” Barr said. “He should be able to do that. And, you know, this canard that this exercise was done to make that possible is totally false. I don’t see anything wrong with the president walking over to the church.”
Authorities initially insisted tear gas had not been used on those park protesters, before walking that statement back.
Police stage in Lafayette Park as demonstrators gather to protest the death of George Floyd, Sunday, May 31, 2020, near the White House in Washington. Floyd died after being restrained by Minneapolis police officers (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Demonstraters, Barr said, have become extreme not only in their actions but also their demands, including their push to defund police departments.
“Demonizing police” is “wrong” and “dangerous,” Barr asserted. “We put these individuals into highly charged, dangerous situations where their own life is at stake … and we have to make sure we treat them fairly in those circumstances.”
Barr added that it’s important to understand that there are approximately 900,000 police officers in the country, and that it would be a mistake to view all police forces as a monolith.
FOX NEWS REPORTER ASSAULTED OUTSIDE WHITE HOUSE
Should police be defunded, Barr said, “You would have increases in vigilantism and increases in chaos in the city.” Barr added it’s “been shown” that more killings would result.
Research by Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. has determined that when police pull out of communities, black deaths tend to increase. Frey also found no evidence of racial bias in police shootings.
And, Zaid Jilani wrote in The Guardian that Baltimore saw a brutal rise in murders after police pulled back there.
“We saw the police department arrest less during a period of high crime,” the Rev. Kinji Scott, a community activist “who lost a brother and a cousin to homicides in other cities,” told Jilani. “So what happened is you have a community of emboldened criminals.”
However, Lisa Bender, the president of the Minneapolis City Council, dismissed concerns from anyone worried about not having police to call — telling CNN on Monday that they were speaking “from a place of privilege.”
At the same time, “the police chiefs, the rank-and-file officers understand the need for change and there has been great change,” Barr said.
The attorney general touted President Trump’s First Step Act, as well as his push for school choice and the creation of opportunity zones to spur investment in low-income areas.
EXCLUSIVE: FIRST STEP ACT RELEASES VIOLENT CRIMINALS
Barr indicated that the federal government should help set standards that abolish the use of police chokeholds and similar techniques. After kneeling for several minutes, top Democrats on Monday introduced a sweeping criminal justice reform bill, which includes a limitation on police officers’ qualified immunity to certain forms of lawsuits for misconduct on the job.
Critics say qualified immunity, a judge-made doctrine, is necessary to protect police from complaints that would punish officers for reasonably executing their duties in stressful situations, or complaints intended to harass officers. Democrats charge, however, that qualified immunity is a shield for bad behavior and has enabled a culture of misconduct.
The “Justice in Policing Act of 2020” would also establish a registry of police misconduct, and would specifically allow officers to be punished for violating constitutional rights “knowingly or with reckless disregard.” The federal standard currently requires that officers “willfully” violate constitutional rights to face prosecution — a significantly higher standard of proof.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., center, and other members of Congress, kneel and observe a moment of silence at the Capitol’s Emancipation Hall, Monday, June 8, 2020, on Capitol Hill in Washington, reading the names of George Floyd and others killed during police interactions. Democrats proposed a sweeping overhaul of police oversight and procedures Monday, an ambitious legislative response to the mass protests denouncing the deaths of black Americans at the hands of law enforcement. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
Further, the federal standard for use of force would change from “reasonableness” to situations where it is “necessary to prevent death or serious bodily injury.”
Additionally, the attorney general said, the DOJ was taking a look at jurisdictions’ approach to the coronavirus, amid widespread hypocrisy on the issue — starting from the early days of the crisis to the present. (Even the man who dressed as the Grim Reaper to condemn beachgoers is now protesting against police.) Barr’s DOJ has taken steps to fight what it perceives as potentially unconstitutional restrictions on religious worship and other gatherings.
The Trump campaign told Fox News earlier Monday that the president would soon resume his trademark rallies. The change-up follows statements by many Democrats in charge of big cities — including several who once insisted on strict quarantine measures — championing the nationwide mass demonstrations over Floyd’s death , sans social distancing.
WSJ OPINION: THE MYTH OF SYSTEMIC POLICE RACISM
Epidemiologists, too, have abruptly changed their tune, even though they once said lockdown measures were so important that they justified widespread unemployment and business closures.
“I think given the uncertainty involved and the very fast pace of the infection, especially in certain areas, the original 30-day or so — and even maybe with some extensions — measures were appropriate,” Barr told Baier. “But I think that as time has gone by, the degree of impingement on fundamental liberties has never been anything like this in the United States nationally, forbidding people from engaging in their livelihood, telling them to stay home. It’s just sort of a form of house arrest in many places.”
Barr added: “There have never been more pervasive or widespread limitations on American liberty than this since slavery. I’m not saying this is a form of slavery. I’m just saying that these are extremely broad limitations. And I think the time has come to restrike the balance and be more limited in what we did and more critical.”
Fox News’ Bret Baier and Andrew O’Reilly contributed to this report.
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]]>The post Barr, in FNC interview, calls defund police push ‘dangerous’ and ‘wrong’ appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>Attorney General Bill Barr on Monday blasted calls from protesters and activists to defund police departments in the wake of George Floyd’s death – saying in an exclusive interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier that going after entire departments is “wrong” and “dangerous.”
Barr’s comments come as demonstrators in cities across the country are holding daily protests against police brutality and racial injustice. After Floyd, an unarmed black man, died in Minneapolis police custody after an officer kneeled on his neck for nearly nine minutes, a number of cities have proposed major cuts or reforms to police departments or – in the case of Minneapolis – moved to “dismantle” the force entirely.
Barr told Fox News he agreed on the need for changes in police departments to address the concerns of many people of color, but he stopped well short of supporting moves to defund departments.
WATCH ATTORNEY GENERAL WILLIAM BARR’S FULL INTERVIEW TONIGHT AT 6PM ET ON ‘SPECIAL REPORT’
“The police chiefs, the rank-and-file officers understand the need for change and there has been great change,” Barr said in the interview, which airs Monday at 6 p.m. ET on Fox News’ “Special Report with Bret Baier.” “I think defunding the police, holding the entire police structure responsible for the actions of certain officers is wrong and I think it is dangerous to demonize police.”
The attorney general referenced a bloody weekend in Chicago that saw “60 to 70 people shot” as a reason for needing to keep police departments funded. Over the last few years, Chicago has been dealing with a scourge of gun violence, with a total of 85 people being shot – 24 fatally – in the last weekend of May.
“If you pull back the police from these communities there will be, there will be more harm done in these communities,” Barr said.
Barr’s comments mirror those of President Trump, who has repeatedly slammed proponents of defunding police departments and cast himself as a “law & order” president.
“This year has seen the lowest crime numbers in our Country’s recorded history, and now the Radical Left Democrats want to Defund and Abandon our Police. Sorry, I want LAW & ORDER!” Trump tweeted on Monday.
Some supporters of the “Defund The Police” movement, however, argue that it isn’t necessarily about eliminating police departments or stripping agencies of all of their money. They say it is time for the country to address systemic problems in policing in America and spend more on what communities across the U.S. need, like housing and education.
State and local governments spent $115 billion on policing in 2017, according to data compiled by the Urban Institute.
“Why can’t we look at how it is that we reorganize our priorities, so people don’t have to be in the streets during a national pandemic?” Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza asked during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
The group MPD150, which says it is “working towards a police-free Minneapolis,” argues that such action would be more about “strategically reallocating resources, funding, and responsibility away from police and toward community-based models of safety, support, and prevention.”
“The people who respond to crises in our community should be the people who are best-equipped to deal with those crises,” the group wrote on its website.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
Yet, Minneapolis city officials appear to be taking the “defund” push literally, announcing a veto-proof majority to dismantle the department, despite objections from the mayor.
Meanwhile, while most federal lawmakers have come out against supporting moves to fully defund police departments – some Democrats have expressed sympathy with the sentiments behind the movement – mayors in some of the nation’s largest cities are moving to divert spending on their law enforcement departments into other services despite furor from police unions.
In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Sunday that the city would move funding from the NYPD to youth initiatives and social services, while keeping the city safe, but he didn’t give details.
In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti vowed to cut as much as $150 million that was part of a planned increase in the police department’s budget.
Disbanding an entire department has happened before. In 2012, with crime rampant in Camden, New Jersey, the city disbanded its police department and replaced it with a new force that covered Camden County. Compton, California, took the same step in 2000, shifting its policing to Los Angeles County.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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]]>The post In Her Interview With Megyn Kelly, Tara Reade Clarifies Her Story appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>Reade came off well in the non-traditional venue, and seemed to accept that her story might not change the outcome of the Democratic primary.
Tara Reade speaks to Megyn Kelly in an interview released Friday.
Megyn Kelly, YouTube
On Friday evening, former Fox News and NBC News host Megyn Kelly posted the first on-camera interview with Tara Reade, who has accused Joe Biden of sexually assaulting her when she was an assistant in his Senate office in 1993. The conversation, which was edited down to 42 minutes and can be viewed in full on YouTube, included a few more details about the alleged assault and the conversations Reade says she had with friends and family after the fact, but there were no new revelations or bomb-drops. If you’ve listened to Reade’s interview with Katie Halper and have been following the story in the news, the Kelly video won’t much change your understanding of the case.
But there’s a reason why both supporters and skeptics of Reade were waiting with great anticipation for her first on-camera appearance. Even with both versions of the story on the table—Biden says the assault never happened— it seems easier to assess a person’s credibility when you can see their face and hear their voice. Reading the text of Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony on Brett Kavanaugh was a very different experience from watching her deliver it to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The difference may be entirely subjective, but in a situation with no clear objective way to find resolution, it makes a difference.
In this case, Reade conducts her conversation with Kelly with admirable poise. She gamely proffers minute details about her experience in the Senate, and says she can’t remember when she can’t remember. She appears on the verge of tears when she recalls Biden’s alleged pivot from sexually cajoling her to insulting her, but she forges ahead and finishes her story.
Broadcast interviews have become a benchmark for public responses to controversies in part because America has a long of history of producing television journalists regarded as some of the most unbiased and rigorous in the business. In today’s polarized political landscape, there are few broadcast journalists out there that engender the kind of deep, trusting relationships many Americans had with the likes of Barbara Walters and Tom Brokaw in years past. Even considering this, Kelly, who made her name agitating right-wing culture warriors on Fox News, is about as far as you can get in semi-mainstream journalism from a widely trusted character. According to BuzzFeed, Reade had gotten invitations to appear on every major television network, but chose to grant her first on-camera interview to Kelly, who is currently not affiliated with a network and instead broadcasts her interviews on her Instagram and YouTube pages. Without the backing of any established news outlet, Kelly has no established standards to uphold, or even job to keep. If Reade was looking to bolster her credibility by doing an on-camera interview with a broadly respected journalist, she didn’t make the most obvious pick.
So why did she choose Kelly? Reade told Buzzfeed that as she assessed her offers from television networks, she was looking for “a safe platform to tell my full history with Joe Biden,” and that she believes the “mainstream media” is biased toward Biden. Kelly, who famously helped oust Roger Ailes from Fox News by going public with her story of Ailes’ sexual harassment, may have seemed like a compassionate interviewer for a survivor of sexual assault. But Kelly’s current status as a one-woman show left viewers to wonder how else she made her broadcast look like the best option for Reade. Did she offer Reade a list of questions in advance? Input into the final edit? It’s possible that “The MK Interview” abides by strict journalistic standards, offering no leeway. It’s also possible that she’s a little less stringent, because she can be. The uncertainty makes Kelly a dubious choice for a woman who wants to be believed.
Based on the cut, the way Kelly structured the interview serves Reade well. She presses Reade for details without coming off as insensitive. Tangents that seem somewhat beside the point—during Reade’s recounting of the alleged assault, Kelly demands particulars about the precise construction of Reade’s underwear, for example—end up allowing Reade to paint a fuller picture of the story she’s telling. And the majority of the interview consists of Reade confronting a devil’s advocate, played by Kelly, who asks Reade to respond to the many reasons for disbelief people have raised in the wake of her allegation: her writings about Vladimir Putin’s “sensuous image” and “athletic prowess,” her tweet commending Biden’s political work on sexual assault, her support for Bernie Sanders, the way she first brought the allegation to the presidential campaigns of Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren. What would Reade say to Democrats who think she’s making it all up to keep Biden out of office, Kelly asks. How would she respond to people who believe her but will still vote for Biden because they think Donald Trump is way worse? To those who wonder why, if Biden so brazenly assaulted Reade in a public corridor of a government building, no other alleged assault victims have come forward? Don’t men like this usually exhibit a pattern of behavior?
Whether or not they believed her, people wanted to see Reade answer to her critics.
This type of questioning is exactly what broadcast interviews were made for. Whether or not they believed her, people wanted to see Reade answer to her critics. Though the Kelly interview’s clumsy editing makes every cut plainly audible, viewers still get a sense of how Reade responds to the kinds of pointed follow-up questions journalists ask their sources that are difficult to convey in print. Some skeptical viewers might grow more trusting of Reade after hearing her calmly address a wide array of their disparagements and doubts. Others will remain unconvinced. But it’s useful to see Reade face down her detractors’ arguments in a public venue. Every public figure accused of sexual assault has been allowed to do so, after all. As voters continue to assess Reade’s story and discuss her allegation in their own circles, they’ll have a stronger foundation for their eventual conclusions, with Reade’s responses in their minds alongside those who disbelieve her.
The opportunity to counter her critics may have also been cathartic for Reade. While she’s called for Biden to remove himself from the presidential race, this interview makes it seem that this isn’t the main reason she’s spent the past several months trying to get a news outlet or political leader to promulgate her story. Reade even tells Kelly that she doesn’t think Biden will step down. She sounds more concerned with unveiling the hypocrisy she sees in Biden—he “should not be running on character for the president of the United States,” she tells Kelly—and getting her story of her encounter with Biden out in the open. Even the experience of having her past bankruptcy dragged into the public eye by Biden supporters has felt freeing, she tells Kelly. Throughout the interview, she expresses a strong desire to have a “platform” for her story, to correct the record on Biden’s public persona, and to support other survivors of sexual violence by standing firm. The Kelly interview is one major step toward those goals.
It’s hard to imagine, at this point in the presidential race, anyone but Biden securing the Democratic nomination, given the way leaders in the party have responded to Reade’s allegations. It’s unlikely that any more corroboration of an assault will come out, even if someone does unearth the sexual harassment complaint Reade said she filed in the Senate in 1993. (The San Luis Obispo Tribune found a 1996 court document in which Reade’s ex-husband says Reade told him about “a problem she was having at work regarding sexual harassment, in U.S. Senator Joe Biden’s office,” but it doesn’t say whether Biden was the one doing the harassing, nor does it mention a sexual assault.) The people who’ve said Reade told them about the alleged assault in the days or years after it happened—an anonymous friend, Reade’s brother, and her former neighbor Lynda LaCasse—have either changed their stories or had their memories refreshed by Reade before speaking to the press. This doesn’t mean the alleged assault didn’t happen, but neither does it do much to convince voters that Uncle Joe, the public BFF of America’s favorite president, sexually assaulted Tara Reade. This lack of any feasible path to definitively proving what happened makes it nearly impossible for political leaders to justify devising a swift-yet-somehow-democratic rejiggering of the presidential nomination process six months before a world-historically important election in the midst of a global pandemic.
Reade seems like she’s already coming to terms with that reality. In her conversation with Kelly, Reade sounds a bit resigned, like she understands this public stalemate, even if she believes it’s terribly unfair to her. At times, it sounds like she is accepting that Biden might never be held to account for the alleged assault—that a few rounds of dignified interviews and the chance to air her story might be as much as she can hope for under the present circumstances. Reade tells Kelly she’s been disillusioned by the Democratic Party and now considers herself “politically homeless,” but she doesn’t call on the party to replace Biden, nor does she suggest that voters should choose someone else for president. (LaCasse, for one, has said she still intends to vote for Biden, even though she believes he assaulted her friend.)
Instead, Reade puts the onus on Biden to step down and laments the failings of a society that has delivered voters a presidential choice between a multiply accused sexual assailant and, at the very least, a multiply accused manhandler who famously mishandled Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment. “You don’t need to discredit me or not believe me to vote for Joe Biden,” Reade says to Kelly. She repeats the line a few minutes later. It was part condemnation of progressive politicians who’ve defended Biden, part gesture of generosity and grace. Maybe it was part self-preservation, too: If Biden wins the presidency, it won’t be a referendum on her.
The post In Her Interview With Megyn Kelly, Tara Reade Clarifies Her Story appeared first on Virus Reports.
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