In the span of a week, and no thanks to the mainstream press, the accusation by Tara Reade that Joe Biden sexually assaulted her in the mid-1990s gained infinitely more credibility than any of the accusations lodged against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

There are now four people who say that Reade told them about Biden’s assault around the time it happened in 1993. And a tape of “Larry King Live,” during which Reade’s mother apparently phoned in to talk about the abuse, has emerged.

The story Reade tells is that while working in Biden’s Senate office, she was told to deliver a duffel bag to the once and future presidential hopeful. She says Biden pushed her up against a wall, reached under her skirt, and violated her with his fingers. And that, when she resisted, Biden said, “Aw man, I heard you liked me,” and then, “You’re OK, you’re fine.”

Reade says she complained to her supervisors and then filed a complaint with the Senate’s human resources office.

We’re not talking about some hazy, half-remembered, and completely uncorroborated story about drunken high school hijinks that Democrats hoped would derail Kavanaugh’s nomination, and led to wall-to-wall coverage by the press.

Whether Reade’s story holds up to close scrutiny is far from certain. But it certainly deserves more scrutiny than it’s gotten. At least as much as the press gave a Supreme Court nominee. Biden, after all, wants to be the leader of the free world. And his party has repeatedly set the standard of proof for such accusations at the “believe all women” level.

What’s more, unlike Kavanaugh, Biden has a reputation for creepily and inappropriately touching women in public. In fact, last year seven women came forward accusing Biden of kissing, or hugging or otherwise touching them in ways that made them squirm.

Just as important, Reade doesn’t have an ideological ax to grind against her alleged assailant. She’s a liberal Democrat who presumably cannot fathom the thought of a second Trump term.

As is usually the case when a scandal involves a Democrat, the press did a perfunctory “investigation” after the accusations emerged, and quickly concluded that Reade’s story wasn’t entirely credible because she’d provided different accounts and because other Biden staffers don’t recall her complaining.

But it wasn’t long after the New York Times concluded its “investigation” that the Larry King video appeared. On it, Reade’s mother asks “what a staffer would do besides go to the press in Washington? My daughter has just left there, after working for a prominent senator, and could not get through with her problems at all, and the only thing she could have done was go to the press, and she chose not to do it out of respect for him.”

As Ryan Grim, former D.C. bureau chief for the leftist Huffington Post who’s now with the Intercept, put it, the King tape “calls into question the credibility of Biden’s denial.”

Subsequent to that, two more people came forward to claim that Reade had provided contemporaneous accounts.

The mainstream press has so far ignored these latest developments.

(This is to say nothing of the press’ steady silence about the increasingly obvious decline in Biden’s mental faculties.)

Such unpleasantries involving a Democrat are to be ignored or brushed aside until after the election, and even then the chances are slim it will ever be brought up. And anyone who tries to make an issue of it is immediately castigated for being a tool of Republicans.

Conservatives often complain that the media have a double standard. But they don’t. They have one standard: Do whatever it takes to get Democrats elected and keep them in office.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board.

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