Joe Biden and Donald Trump
Ron Adar | Echoes Wire | Barcroft Media via Getty Images: Mandel Ngan | AFP | Getty Images
President Donald Trump, who has been accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women, advised former Vice President Joe Biden to “fight” a sexual assault allegation against him from 27 years ago.
Tara Reade recently filed a complaint with Washington, D.C., police saying that Biden sexually assaulted her while he served in the Senate in 1993. Police have moved the complaint to “inactive” status.
Biden on Friday denied the allegation, saying that “it never, never happened.”
Trump weighed in after Biden’s denial, which marked the Democrat’s first public statement on the matter. “I would just say to Joe Biden, ‘Just go out and fight it,'” Trump said in an interview with conservative radio host Dan Bongino.
“He’s going to have to make his own decision, I’m not going to be telling him what to do,” Trump added. “Biden is going to have to go out and fight his own battles.”
Trump, who is set to face Biden in the presidential election in November, called Reade “credible” in the interview, but suggested that in dealing with allegations like hers, he likes “to get in front of it and I just deny it.”
Trump himself has been accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women. He has denied the allegations, repeatedly.
He won the White House in 2016 despite the bombshell disclosure of an old tape from the TV program “Access Hollywood” that revealed how he had bragged about groping women’s genitals without their consent. The tape came to light weeks before the election.
Trump has also been accused of sexually groping and harassing multiple women. One accuser, the writer E. Jean Carroll, claims in a civil defamation lawsuit that he raped her in a department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. Trump has denied all allegations of sexual misconduct.
“I’ve been falsely accused by people that I’ve never even seen, I’ve never even seen many of these people. And some of these people, I met them – zero interest, OK? Like zero,” Trump said.
“And all of a sudden you become a wealthy guy, you’re a famous guy, then you become president, and people just – people that you’ve never seen, that you’ve never heard of make charges. So I guess in a way you could say I’m, I’m sticking up for him,” he said, referring to Biden.
Reade shook up Biden’s presidential campaign in March when she claimed on a podcast that Biden pinned her to a wall and used his fingers to penetrate her in an office building on Capitol Hill when he was a senator from Delaware.
Trump allies have been using Reade’s allegations against the former vice president.
Biden himself, breaking weeks of silence on the issue, addressed the allegation Friday morning in an interview with MSNBC. In a statement released just before the interview, Biden cited “the full and growing record of inconsistencies” in the accusations and said: “They aren’t true. This never happened.”
Multiple other women have accused Biden of inappropriate and unwanted touching since he launched his campaign a year ago.
— CNBC’s Dan Mangan, Tucker Higgins and Kevin Breuninger contributed to this report.