Right now, the available evidence does not prove that Joe Biden more likely than not committed the 1993 assault that his former Senate staffer Tara Reade has alleged. Part of this is purely on the virtue of the age of the allegation limiting the available evidence, but as of now, the other bellwethers usually indicating that even a decades-old assault can be proven beyond the preponderance of evidence — multiple contemporaneously corroborating witnesses, a pattern of behavior, a consistent account — just haven't materialized.

In other words, if Biden were an ordinary presidential candidate, a thorough media investigation into the allegation would probably exonerate him. But the former vice president is no normal candidate. He's a Democrat for one thing, but more importantly, he's a Democrat running against President Trump, which has led the media to run circles around Reade's allegation in a way that could have read as a standard manifestation of the Democrat-media sycophancy complex.

Until now.

After Reade claimed to the Intercept that her late mother called in to Larry King Live on CNN shortly after she alleged she was assaulted, a follower of the left-wing news outlet unearthed the clip. Although Reade's mother is not named, the date, location, and details of the call do fit the theory that it was her mother. The call, which doesn't go into much more detail than that Reade had "problems" while working for a "prominent senator" and had since quit, in no way confirms that Reade alleged that Biden had forcibly penetrated her or even attempted to assault her at the time. But it does confirm that Reade did indeed complain about something about Biden in the summer of 1993.

A generous and even sensible reading of this call is that it confirms what Reade originally alleged in 2019, that Biden, as we've known he's done for years, creepily touched her neck and generally invaded her personal space, albeit with no obvious intent of personal gratification, sexually or otherwise. Even if you're the most die-hard Democrat in the media, it makes little sense why you wouldn't just want to investigate and then exhaust the Reade allegation so it doesn't hang over his head until Election Day. But after months of the media hedging on the Reade story, the specific Larry King Live episode apparently featuring Reade's mother has inexplicably gone missing on CNN's Google Play archives of the show.

All of which raises the question: What does CNN know that we don't?

Thanks to New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet's admission that their extraordinarily late piece on Reade's allegation was stealth-edited after interference from the Biden campaign, we already know that Team Biden is actively shaping media coverage of the allegation and, more worrisome, that supposedly independent media organizations are complying. Given CNN's relative silence on the Reade allegation, the network's top bosses' toxic obsession with Trump, and the size of the Larry King Live archive on Google Play, it cannot possibly be ruled out that the episode's disappearance was the result of Biden-backing CNN executives intentionally memory-holing it. Now tell me, do you corrupt your credibility so thoroughly when you think a man is innocent?

There better be explanations and soon. Otherwise, CNN's management just proved it's hellbent on proving itself every bit as fake news as Trump claims it is, and, more consequentially, it will start looking like Biden has something to hide.