On Friday's Real Time show on HBO, liberal host Bill Maher repeated several pieces of misinformation to undermine Tara Reade's sexual assault accusations against Joe Biden as the HBO host accused his fellow liberals of giving too much attention to the story as Democratic nominee Biden runs against President Donald Trump.
Maher began his closing commentary:
BILL MAHER: Just because Fox News is obsessed with the Biden sex assault allegations doesn't mean the rest of us have to be. You may have noticed Donald Trump has one move: accuse you of the very thing he's guilty of. ... Okay, well, now it's Joe Biden grabs women by the p*****."
He then complained that some liberals are giving too much credibility to the story:
MAHER: He doesn't even need to say it. The liberal media and the liberal party is doing it for him -- exactly what Republicans want, for us to go down the rabbit hole of "Joe Biden, sex monster." So now, everybody is investigating. It's a "he said, she said, she said something else entirely." Yes, Biden's accuser, Tara Reade, has been contradicted by multiple people, most importantly, Tara Reade. Just last year, she said of Biden, "I wasn't scared of him that he was going to take me in a room or anything. It wasn't that kind of vibe."
Maher then made his first two incorrect claims about the former Biden office employee as he added:
MAHER: She suggested she had filed a sex harassment report -- now, she says she didn't. She says she was fired by Biden's office, but in deleted posts, she said she left because quote, "I love Russia with all my heart. President Putin scares the power elite in America because he is a compassionate, caring, and visionary leader. His obvious reverence for women, children, animals, and sports is intoxicating to American women."
According to several sources, including her May 8 interview with Megyn Kelly, Reade stated that she did make a written complaint about some of the harassment but did not actually use the words "sexual harassment" in the report.
As for Maher's claim that Reade had blamed anti-Russia sentiments in the U.S. for quitting her job at Biden's office, he may have picked up this misinformation from an article published by New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg which linked to an article Reade published in 2018. In that piece, Reade cited anti-Russia sentiments in American government as the reason she quit politics "a few years ago," which would have been around 2015 or 2016. The time she had worked in Biden's office was between 1992 and 1993, so she seemed to be referring to her involvement in politics generally rather than working for Biden decades earlier.
Nearig the end of his commentary, Maher also incorrectly claimed that she waited until after Biden was already the Democratic nominee before coming forward with the assault accusation. He even threw in the false claim that President Trump advised people to "drink bleach" to stop the coronavirus:
MAHER: Well, I'm no good at being noble, either, but if in 1993 if Joe Biden had grabbed my nuts in a corridor -- I was in Washington that year -- and I had this knowledge and revealing it could hurt the guy running against Trump, I'd save it for my memoirs. I'd like to think that I have a little more perspective. We have a President who says, "Drink bleach." Geez, you waited 27 years -- it couldn't hold a few months.
That's what I would like to ask Ms. Reade. Why now? I'm not saying, "Why not 27 years ago?" I understand it can take victims years to come forward. I'm saying, "Why not before Super Tuesday? Why not last fall when we still have a dozen other candidates to choose from? Why wait until Biden is our only hope against Trump and then take him down?
But according to interviews with both Megyn Kelly and liberal podcast host Katie Halper, Reade recalled contacting a number of different prominent news organizations since last summer trying to publicize the sexual assault accusation. She even recalled contacting elected politicians and presidential campaigns, including Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, without success in finding help.
Additionally, she also related in both interviews that, in January, she sought help from the group Time's Up, which works with sexual abuse victims, but they declined to help citing concerns that it would jeopardize their tax-exempt status.
Maher also ignored witnesses who have corroborated that she had previously spoken of the assault with them, including one former employee of former Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy's office, who spoke with Kelly's producer about the matter.
Additionally, documentation was recently released in which her ex-husband recalled that she spoke of the harassment in the 1990s.
Below is a transcript of relevant portions of the Friday, May 8, Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO:
Real Time With Bill Maher
5/8/2020
BILL MAHER: Just because Fox News is obsessed with the Biden sex assault allegations doesn't mean the rest of us have to be. You may have noticed Donald Trump has one move: accuse you of the very thing he's guilty of. ... Okay, well, now it's Joe Biden grabs women by the p*****."
He doesn't even need to say it. The liberal media and the liberal party is doing it for him -- exactly what Republicans want, for us to go down the rabbit hole of "Joe Biden, sex monster." So now, everybody is investigating. It's a "he said, she said, she said something else entirely." Yes, Biden's accuser, Tara Reade, has been contradicted by multiple people, most importantly, Tara Reade. Just last year, she said of Biden, "I wasn't scared of him that he was going to take me in a room or anything. It wasn't that kind of vibe."
She suggested she had filed a sex harassment report -- now, she says she didn't. She says she was fired by Biden's office, but in deleted posts, she said she left because quote, "I love Russia with all my heart. President Putin scares the power elite in America because he is a compassionate, caring, and visionary leader. His obvious reverence for women, children, animals, and sports is intoxicating to American women."
What?! What the f***? We're letting this person change the subject from Donald Trump, lethal incompetent, to Joe Biden, sex monster? She literally wrote a love letter to the murderer trying to keep Biden out of the White House.
Yet the New York Times is calling on the DNC to establish a truth panel on this.Truth panel, huh? Which part? Putin's reverence to animals or he is intoxicating to women?
And Democrats are coalescing around the position that this accusation must be thoroughly vetted for the party to keep its credibility. Well, credibility certainly is a problem for the party on this issue mostly because they "woke" themselves into a corner when they adopted "Believe Women " as their slogan when it always should have been "Take Accusations Seriously." Kirsten Gillibrand said of the Al Franken allegations, "The women who came forward felt it was sexual harassment, so it was."
That was never tenable because believing everything doesn't make you noble -- it makes you gullible and leaves us with a world where Republicans don't care about this stuff. It's just a unilateral weapon that is used only against Democrats. Trump rides the bus with Billy Bush -- we throw Franken under it.
You know, Democrats are the party of choice. We can choose not to completely f*** ourselves over this. I know it's a sex scandal, and, in normal times, that's what we do instead of issues, but there are actually some pretty big problems going on right now. I don't know if you noticed, but America has turned into a failed state that does worse job of keeping its citizens alive during a pandemic than Cambodia. And, to me, that's a little more important than Tara Reade achieving closure.
(…)
Well, I'm no good at being noble, either, but if in 1993 if Joe Biden had grabbed my nuts in a corridor -- I was in Washington that year -- and I had this knowledge and revealing it could hurt the guy running against Trump, I'd save it for my memoirs. I'd like to think that I have a little more perspective. We have a President who says, "Drink bleach." Geez, you waited 27 years -- it couldn't hold a few months.
That's what I would like to ask Ms. Reade. Why now? I'm not saying, "Why not 27 years ago?" I understand it can take victims years to come forward. I'm saying, "Why not before Super Tuesday? Why not last fall when we still have a dozen other candidates to choose from? Why wait until Biden is our only hope against Trump and then take him down?
This story is gathering an Importance it should not have. There is so much at stake in this next election. The entire world needs to be put back together like Humpty Dumpty. Why should one person's victimhood trump everyone else's?
