From Juanita Broaddrick to Tara Reade: In Forty Years Has Nothing Changed at All?

Juanita Broaddrick, right, with residents of her Arkansas retirement home and Bill Clinton in April 1978, the same month she alleges that Clinton assaulted her (source)

by Thomas Neuburger

Hid among the grease and grime of the Tara Reade rape discussion — "Should we believe her? To what extent? Would Biden really do such a thing? But what if a public discussion leads to Trump's reelection?" — lies the shadow of another rape accusation.

Undiscussed, rarely brought up, as carefully hid or moreso by the Democratic Party–supporting media as the Tara Reade story was, stands the rape charge by Juanita Broaddrick against 32-year-old Arkansas Attorney General Bill Clinton, a rape said to have occurred in 1978.

The facts are these (source: a nicely researched 2017 piece by Dylan Mathews at Vox). First, this is what Broaddrick says happened:

In 1978, Broaddrick was volunteering for Clinton's gubernatorial campaign, and claims she met him when he visited his campaign office in her home town of Van Buren, Arkansas, that April. She says he then invited her to visit his office in Little Rock, which Broaddrick agreed to do a week later, when she was in the state Capitol anyway for a conference of nursing home administrators. Once she was at a hotel in Little Rock, she claims Clinton told her that he wasn't going to the campaign headquarters and offered to meet her in her hotel lobby coffee shop instead. Once he arrived, she says he called her room and suggested that they have coffee there, since the lobby had too many reporters. Broaddrick says she agreed.

Then according to a 1999 Washington Post story:

As she tells the story, they spent only a few minutes chatting by the window -- Clinton pointed to an old jail he wanted to renovate if he became governor -- before he began kissing her. She resisted his advances, she said, but soon he pulled her back onto the bed and forcibly had sex with her. She said she did not scream because everything happened so quickly. Her upper lip was bruised and swollen after the encounter because, she said, he had grabbed onto it with his mouth.

"The last thing he said to me was, 'You better get some ice for that.' And he put on his sunglasses and walked out the door," she recalled.

Broaddrick's story has no third-party witness, but quite a lot of contemporaneous corroboration:

• The director at the nursing home where Broaddrick worked told reporters "that she entered the hotel room shortly after the assault allegedly took place, and 'found Mrs. Broaddrick crying and in 'a state of shock.' Her upper lip was puffed out and blue, and appeared to have been hit.' Kelsey elaborated to the New York Times, "She told me he forced himself on her, forced her to have intercourse."

• In 1999, three of Broaddrick's friends told NBC News on camera that Broaddrick told them at the time that Bill Clinton had raped her.

• In addition, David Broaddrick "with whom Broaddrick was having an affair ... also NBC that Broaddrick's top lip was black after the alleged incident, and that she told him, 'that she had been raped by Bill Clinton.'"

The Other Side

Opposed to this evidence lie the usual adversarial questions about why Broaddrick delayed so long to say something, why she chose the time she did to come forward, and what her underlying motives might have been. Bill Clinton was being impeached for the Monica Lewinski affair — pilloried, really, by Ken Starr's special prosecutor's office — when Broaddrick's story was leaked to the public.

The response to this has been that Broaddrick, according to Vox, "had been courted to come forward about the allegations by Clinton enemies for years," and refused many pleas that she speak out.

"She only came forward after she was interviewed by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's office and her allegation leaked. Broaddrick told the [Wall Street] Journal [here] that NBC News reporter Lisa Myers pursued her for nearly a year before she agreed to an interview, and that she came forward because she wanted to rebut false rumors circulating after her statements to prosecutors (like that David Broaddrick had accepted hush money from the Clintons in exchange for silence)."

In short, if Vox's account is correct, Broaddrick was almost literally the most reluctant of reluctant witnesses at a time when Bill Clinton was beset on all sides with eager ones.

Did Hillary Clinton Weigh In?

It's an ugly story, both in the context in which it occurred — the dubiously moral, hypocritical Republican Party assaulting a presidency it never considered legitimate using charges they themselves were guilty of at the time — and in the Broaddrick story itself.

And the ugliness continued, according to Broaddrick, shortly after the event. In a 1999 interview she gave to the Drudge Report and quoted by Vox, Broaddrick said that "mere weeks after the alleged [1978] assault, Hillary Clinton had tried to thank her for her silence on the matter at a political rally." Broaddrick:

She came directly to me as soon as she hit the door. I had been there only a few minutes, I only wanted to make an appearance and leave. She caught me and took my hand and said 'I am so happy to meet you. I want you to know that we appreciate everything you do for Bill.'

Here her husband had just done this to me, and she was coming up to thank me? It was scary...I started to turn away and she held onto my hand and reiterated her phrase -- looking less friendly and repeated her statement----'Everything you do for Bill'. I said nothing. She wasn't letting me get away until she made her point. She talked low, the smile faded on the second thank you. I just released her hand from mine and left the gathering.

No one knows for sure what happened between Broaddrick and Bill Clinton in the hotel room save Broaddrick and Clinton himself, just as no one but Broaddrick and Hillary Clinton knows for sure what passed between them at the rally just a few weeks later — and only Clinton herself knows for sure what she meant to convey, regardless of how Broaddrick took it.

But if Christine Blasey Ford is credible (in my opinion, eminently so), then Tara Reade is credible at the very least — and so is Juanita Broaddrick.

The #MeToo Era: The Briefest of Lights in 40 Years of Darkness

Why bring this up? Because the alleged Broaddrick rape occurred in 1978 — and here we are, in 2020, with many of the same actors, all with the same loyalties, using much the same tactics to silence and sidestep the consequences of almost the same (alleged) crime, the forceable rape of a low-level female political associate by a high-level male with a history of intruding on women.

      Juanita Broaddrick, 1978
      Cover-up continuing, 2020

      Tara Reade, 1993
      Cover-up continuing, 2020

Has nothing changed for Democratic Party leaders in those 42 years?

It's almost as though the #MeToo era, two and a half years at most, the briefest of lights in two dark generations, never occurred at all.
 

When Will Biden Put Aside His Ego And Withdraw For The Sake Of The Country?

One of the Manchester, New Hampshire state legislative districts has 3 seats in the state House. All the candidates, regardless of party, run on one ballot. It's a blue area and the three top vote-getters were all Democrats. In 2018, Democrats Chris Herbert and Ben Baroody came in first and second with over 5,000 votes each. Richard Komi, after polling last in the Democratic primary, came in third with 4,517 votes, beating out top GOP vote-getter Ross Terrio's 3,868 votes. The conservative Komi, a Nigerian refugee, had supported Biden all through the primaries. Bernie came in first in New Hampshire with 76,324 votes. Biden came in a distant 5th with just 24,921 votes, too few votes to qualify for any delegates. And in Hillsborough County, which Komi represents, Bernie also came in first with 25.7% with Biden again, a distant 4th and just 8.8%. Komi didn't mind that his constituents are more progressive than he is. And they probably don't care anymore either since he resigned Friday. Why? Look at this tweet for his boy Status Quo Joe, now deleted:

House Speaker Steve Shurtleff was mortified and told Komi to resign: "I am appalled by Representative Komi’s comments. They were dismissive and hurtful to survivors of sexual assault across the Granite State and across the country. The comments are not fitting for the New Hampshire House of Representatives and immediately upon learning of them I called him and asked Representative Komi to resign his seat."

The Tara Reade scandal has been building slowly. Biden and his handlers had hoped it would go away if they just ignored it-- and, indeed, pre-primary no one from the corporate media would touch it. Now the corporate media is all over it and Biden has finally been forced to respond. His allies are smearing Reade viciously and are basically one tiny baby step away from asserting she paid men to let her blow them. One of them has already said Putin paid her to accuse poor ole Joe, who everyone knows never puts his hands in any women, just all over them. Non-corporate media has been covering this already, of course.

Saturday, Caroline Kitchener asked and tried to answer a question for Washington Post readers-- could Biden really step aside because he has been exposed? "No presidential candidate," wrote Kitchener, "wants to be on the wrong end of an 'October surprise': Major news breaks at the last minute-- maybe the media unearths an old videotape, or the FBI resuscitates a closed investigation into a particular collection of emails. The campaign has to do damage control with limited time before Election Day. October is still a long way away. It was March 25 when Tara Reade, a former Senate staffer, publicly accused former vice president Joe Biden-- the presumptive Democratic nominee for president-- of digitally penetrating her with his fingers while she worked in his office in 1993. On Monday, Reade’s former neighbor corroborated Reade’s account in an interview with Business Insider, saying Reade told her about the assault in the mid-90s, soon after Reade says it occurred. Biden spoke about the allegation for the first time Friday morning, saying unequivocally: 'This never happened.'" Biden, like Trump, is an inveterate compulsive liar. There's no reason on earth to believe him now, not anymore than there would be to believe Trump.

Some Democrats are asking for Bernie and some of the minor candidates to unsuspend their campaigns and take Biden on. So far no one is biting, some using the shitty excuse that it could cause chaos in the shitty party that demanded such a shitty candidate as their nominee. All the corporate Dems are setting their hair on fire claiming any show of disunity would be playing into Trump's hands. Umm... wouldn't keeping a fatally flawed candidate like Biden on the ticket be playing into Trump's hands? Trump's campaign has many millions of dollars to make sure every voter hears all about this filthy little secret that Biden has endeavored to not address. Kitchener seems eager to present the establishment perspective-- or maybe she's just a gullible fool.

This kind of division within the Democratic Party is exactly what Trump wants, said Democratic strategist Adrienne Elrod, a former spokesperson for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. The calls for Biden to step down are coming from people who didn’t want him to be the nominee in the first place, she said.

“It’s silly talk. I think maybe it gives the far left or people who were not supportive of Joe Biden something to hang their hat on. But it’s not realistic.”

Reade’s allegations might dissuade some voters from turning out for Biden, but a new nominee would likely be far more harmful to the Democrats’ chances of defeating Trump, said Jennifer Lawless, a professor of women and politics at the University of Virginia.

“It would make the Democratic Party look utterly incompetent,” she said.

Groper

More evidence in support of Reade’s claims could potentially change the Democratic Party’s calculus. But that evidence would likely need to be extremely conclusive and damaging, said Lawless — not just more corroborating accounts, like the statements from Reade’s former neighbor-- but a “smoking gun” more in line with Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape, where Trump admitted to sexually assaulting women.

While that kind of evidence did not derail Trump’s presidential campaign, Lawless says, the Democrats have “held themselves to a higher bar” by harshly condemning Trump and Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh for the allegations wagered against them. When former Congressman Al Franken (D-MN) was accused of sexual assault, several high profile Democrats publicly called for his resignation, which led him to eventually step down.

The situation could also shift with public opinion, said Lawless.

“If public opinion polls start to change in the next few weeks, and Biden looks like he is faring less well in some of these battleground states, all bets are off.”

Unless new information emerges, Lawless doesn’t expect the Reade allegations to have a major impact on Democratic voter behavior. That might be different if Biden was not going up against Trump, she says. But evaluated against Trump’s long history of sexual assault allegations-- and the hard evidence of the “Access Hollywood” tape-- Democratic voters concerned with these issues will likely still side with Biden, said Lawless.

“As awful as this is, the worst case for Biden is that he’s now on a level playing field with Trump on this dimension [of sexual assault allegations].”

If “smoking gun” evidence did surface, and pressures mounted for Biden to step aside, he would probably have to do so voluntarily, said Jewitt. Biden has already won too many delegates to lose the nomination in any other way. If that happened, a host of other Democratic candidates would rush to reinstate their campaigns. After the first round of votes at the convention, there would likely be no clear winner, said Jewitt, at which point any other person would be free to jump into the race. (Jewitt has fielded many questions in the past month from people eager to know if New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo could run for president. In this scenario, the answer is yes.)

Based on his age-- 77-- Biden’s vice presidential pick was always going to be particularly important, said Lawless. It’s even more important now. Going forward, the vice presidential nominee-- who Biden has promised will be a woman-- will be called on to defend Biden with regards to these allegations, probably more frequently than Biden is called on to defend himself.

It’s a “tough spot” to be in, Lawless says. But that surely won’t deter prospective nominees. If Biden wins, the vice president will be better positioned for the presidency than any woman in history. Years from now, she could be the one deciding how her party responds to a woman who comes forward to share her story of sexual assault.

The anybody-but-Bernie crowd that owns the corrupt corporate Democratic Party apparatus wants just one thing, for Biden to hang on until they can replace him in a proverbial smoke-filled room with another one of any number of neoliberals, someone putrid who would never win the 2020 primary, a Hillary, Cuomo, Bloomberg, Klobuchar, Newsom... someone who would put voters into the position of having to eat the DNC's shit or be stuck with 4 more years of Trump. The Democratic Party is now a greatly diminished, sad to behold, one-trick pony: heads you lose, tails you lose even worse.

Crime And Punishment And #MeToo

John Lasseter and Emma Thompson

I have no idea how reliable Radio Free Asian is-- though I would guess not very. Last week they reported that "North Korean authorities staged a public trial and shot two female fortune tellers to death last month, forcing tens of thousands of people to watch, in what appeared to be a resumption of public executions. The executions of the two women took place in March in North Hamgyong’s Chongjin city, and were aimed at forcing officials to stop patronizing fortune tellers and engaging in other 'superstitious' behavior, according to two sources who spoke to RFA’s Korean Service on condition of anonymity... 'They pronounced sentences of death and carried out public executions immediately,' the source said, adding that two of the three women put on trial were executed by shooting, with the third sentenced to life in prison.

John Lasseter is not a fortune teller-- nor was he executed. A big-time Hollywood filmmaker, until recently he was the chief creative officer of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios. He won two Academy Awards for his films and those movies of his have made over $19 billion, making him one of the most successful filmmakers of all time. That's a big deal and gives you a lot of moral and ethical leeway, especially in a place like Hollywood (or New York or in DC, as a matter of fact). Lasseter, the father of five sons, is a pig. He molests women employees and Disney was forced-- kicking and screaming-- to fire him. He admitted he had made some "missteps" with employees. Half a year later-- last January-- Skydance Animation hired him. In theory, he's lucky he doesn't give in North Korea-- but just in theory; the #MeToo Movement hasn't quite reached that part of the Hermit Kingdom yet.

Friday night I heard NPR interviewing actress Emma Thompson. She quit a movie she was working on for Skydance after they hired Lasseter. And then she wrote a letter about why, a letter that has been called "the Magna Carta of the #MeToo Movement." This is the letter, which was originally published by the L.A. Times:

As you know, I have pulled out of the production of “Luck”-- to be directed by the very wonderful Alessandro Carloni. It feels very odd to me that you and your company would consider hiring someone with Mr. Lasseter’s pattern of misconduct given the present climate in which people with the kind of power that you have can reasonably be expected to step up to the plate.

I realise that the situation-- involving as it does many human beings--— is complicated. However these are the questions I would like to ask:

If a man has been touching women inappropriately for decades, why would a woman want to work for him if the only reason he’s not touching them inappropriately now is that it says in his contract that he must behave “professionally”?

If a man has made women at his companies feel undervalued and disrespected for decades, why should the women at his new company think that any respect he shows them is anything other than an act that he’s required to perform by his coach, his therapist and his employment agreement? The message seems to be, “I am learning to feel respect for women so please be patient while I work on it. It’s not easy.”

Much has been said about giving John Lasseter a “second chance.” But he is presumably being paid millions of dollars to receive that second chance. How much money are the employees at Skydance being paid to GIVE him that second chance?

If John Lasseter started his own company, then every employee would have been given the opportunity to choose whether or not to give him a second chance. But any Skydance employees who don’t want to give him a second chance have to stay and be uncomfortable or lose their jobs. Shouldn’t it be John Lasseter who has to lose HIS job if the employees don’t want to give him a second chance?

Skydance has revealed that no women received settlements from Pixar or Disney as a result of being harassed by John Lasseter. But given all the abuse that’s been heaped on women who have come forward to make accusations against powerful men, do we really think that no settlements means that there was no harassment or no hostile work environment? Are we supposed to feel comforted that women who feel that their careers were derailed by working for Lasseter DIDN’T receive money?

I hope these queries make the level of my discomfort understandable. I regret having to step away because I love Alessandro so much and think he is an incredibly creative director. But I can only do what feels right during these difficult times of transition and collective consciousness raising.

I am well aware that centuries of entitlement to women’s bodies whether they like it or not is not going to change overnight. Or in a year. But I am also aware that if people who have spoken out-- like me-- do not take this sort of a stand then things are very unlikely to change at anything like the pace required to protect my daughter’s generation.

Yours most sincerely,

Emma Thompson

Too bad she wasn't around to talk to the U.S. Senate before they confirmed Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Not too late, though, to send a copy of the letter to Nancy Pelosi-- maybe to shame her into ending the shameful coverup she perpetrated for Los Angeles Democratic Congressman Tony Cárdenas.

Your Sunday Night Biden-- You Really Want Four Years Of This?

Friday evening, Bill Maher did what you would expect Bill Maher to do-- excused Joe Biden's behavior, with some cute jokes ("his hands have been part of an exploratory committee for decades"). Although he considers the whole #MeToo thing "a little nitpicky," he did acknowledge that "of course, no one likes to be touched unwantingly and women get a lot more of that than men but..." Yes, but. One of the best-- and most productive-- members of my senior management team at one of the companies I ran would go a little further than Biden did. He's gay and he would, in a very friendly way, grab men's crotches as a way of accessing if their penis was large enough for him to bother with; he's a size queen. Men didn't like that. Gay men didn't like it; straight men didn't like it. How do you think Bill Maher would feel about it? Especially if it was done by someone in a position of authority over him? Someone who could determine how much his bonus would be, for example? A little nitpicky?



A second Trump term make me feel gross and uneasy too, Bill. That's what Bernie's there for. Watch this. I agree with this guy on every call but two. The Omaha, Nebraska has one electoral vote and Bernie's going to get it in 2020. And Florida... I'm not as sure as he is that Florida is going to Trump. But that's a little nitpicky because it doesn't matter since Bernie will have already crushed Trump in the electoral college before all Florida's votes are counted.



Enough of Bill Maher's Biden-isn't-so-bad jokes? "it's getting ridiculous." Is it? How about talking about Biden's actual record as a corporate whore and Wall Street shill? Or about his grotesque racism instead of the touchy-feely stuff? Still, later in the show, Maher brought on Julián Castro to say he likes that Biden finally found something he's not willing to apologize over. "I like that," Maher said to Castro, about Biden saying he's not sorry for feeling up women for 60 or 70 or 80 years or for however long he's been acting like a creep. And he ten launched into a disgusting attack on Castro for a statement he had made on Maddow's show about taking Biden's attitude towards women serious ("with great gravitas"). "I think he should joke about; I don't think it's that big a deal," said Maher, who has been making a career for himself as Mister-Anti-Politically-Correct.

Castro killed him. Maher played the part of pig. Castro played the part of ethics teacher-- and Maher's audience agreed with Castro... loudly. Maher didn't like it when Castro used the word "bullshit-- twice-- to describe Maher's intention of laughing it off. Watch the exchange at the link above.

New York Magazine got a groups of their regular writers together for a chat about the Biden thing, Is The Biden Appeal About To Fade?. I sure hope so, but many people-- mostly people over 70 who have lost their memories or who are very conservative Democrats-- disagree with me. The panel consisted of Benjamin Hart, Jonathan Chait, Margaret Hartmann, Ed Kilgore, Ezekiel Kweku, Eric Levitz, David Wallace-Wells, and Ben Williams. Kweku made the salient point right off that bat that he may not be the best candidate to beat Trump-- Biden's pitch, his calling card-- because "his high ratings are pure Obama nostalgia, and I have my doubts that they would carry him through both a primary and a general election. Chait and Williams seem to agree: "I likewise suspect his campaign performance would bring him back to Earth," said Chait. "People forget all the gaffes. He has run before and lost very badly!" and Williams added that he feels "it’s better to nominate someone without a decades-long record to attack. Anti-Trump sentiment is going to rally behind any candidate."

Ezekiel: Biden has to appeal to a different set of voters than Trump does.

Ed: Biden is pretty slowly morphing into a 2020 version of Hillary Clinton, without her particular gender issue-- beginning as a unity candidate but becoming more controversial every day. Eventually, that will affect both his primary and his general-election numbers. Or maybe I just don’t get his avuncular, “Uncle Joe” appeal.

Ben H: I just wonder if that appeal, which, yes, is strongly tied to Obama nostalgia, is a little deeper and harder to uproot than we understand.

Margaret: I think a lot of people feel the statute of limitations has run out on stuff Biden did decades ago, and they’re really attached to him as an Obama administration figure.

Ben H: I also think there’s a strong sense out there among older white Democrats that nominating a woman and/or a person of color would be a risky move.

Ezekiel: Plenty of white guys to choose from.

Margaret: Are there, though? Guys who have that combo of experienced, “electable,” and centrist? And aren’t 37? If I’m a voter looking for that, I’ve eliminated Beto, Sanders, Buttigieg … who’s left?  (I’m seriously asking-- I can’t remember everyone in the field anymore.)

Ed: There’s Tim Ryan, as of today. If Biden doesn’t run, Terry McAuliffe and Bloomberg probably will.

Ezekiel: Why do you need “electable” and “centrist”? Isn’t the appeal of centrism, in this context, electability?

Ed: I’m not sure how to define “electability” anymore. Biden has led Trump pretty consistently in polls, in a way that no one else has. But I’m guessing that won’t last.

Ezekiel: I very much don’t understand the profile of a voter who (1) thinks a woman or person of color is a risky move and (2) likes Biden because he was in Obama’s administration. I’m not saying that these people don’t exist, I just don’t understand what exactly they’re thinking.

Ed: I’ll say this about his personal appeal: Everyone talks about the terrible legacy of the 1994 crime bill, and I agree with much of the criticism. But I also remember watching CSPAN, transfixed for hours (something I never did), as Biden made the case for it. There was a point at which he alluded to NRA president Charlton Heston’s claim that the bill wouldn’t actually provide as many cops as sponsors claimed, and Biden commented: “I went home last night and my wife said, ‘Joe, you said the bill had 100,000 cops, but MOSES said it didn’t!,’” and went on in that vein for a while. It was great theater. So he’s capable of that sort of thing.

Eric: I think giving Trump another opportunity to attack his opponent as one of the out-of-touch elites who supported the Iraq War and is in bed with the finance industry isn’t ideal. But they all have liabilities.

Ben H: It’s true that the big-business coziness hasn’t stuck to him yet, and will likely be a potent line of attack.

Ed: I’ve heard no rumors of Obama vocally coming to his defense. Has anyone else?

Ben H: No, and I seriously doubt he will. I don’t think he wants Biden to win... he never seemed enthusiastic about Biden’s potential candidacy in 2016. He easily could have boosted him, but he didn’t.

Put Bernie Sanders' Face on those Joe Biden Photos, Then Imagine What Party Leaders Would Be Saying

Jon Stewart as Biden: "Hey girl, you seem tense. Is it the stress of me groping you for 28 straight seconds?"

by Thomas Neuburger

An interesting thing is happening around Joe Biden's #MeToo moment. Even though Al Franken was almost immediately rousted from the Senate by now-presidential candidate Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and others for unwanted touching and kissing, handsy kissy Joe Biden is being held to a very different standard. Why?

The Democratic Party Reaction to Joe Biden

Let's start with Kirsten Gillibrand's reaction. Recently I asked, "Does Kirsten Gillibrand Consider Joe Biden's Behavior 'Disqualifying'?" We now have an answer. Here's Gillibrand on Hardball speaking with Chris Matthews (link; skip to 4:38 to listen to the entire Biden conversation). When Matthews asks "What should he do?" Gillibrand responds (my emphasis):

Gillibrand: Well you know, Chris, [sexual assault] is something I've taken very seriously over the last seven or eight years, fighting against sexual assault in the military, sexual assault on college campuses, and actually changing the rules in the House and Senate on harassment, so I think with these allegations specifically, I think it's something if Vice President Biden intends to run, he's just going to have to address directly with the American people.

And there you have it: Even though I've made it my brand to care about sexual assault, Biden can stay in the presidential race, so long as he explains himself. She continues with this: 

Matthews: What should he say?

Gillibrand: There's a conversation about do we value women. And when you allow the space for women to tell their truth and what they experienced, you have to not only receive and believe them, you have to investigate. 

Think back to Franken, who was forced out "without any real vetting of the allegations facing him," as Politico put it. Apparently, the "you have to investigate" rule applies only to Biden. Quite the inconsistency.

So Matthews asks about Gillibrand's position on Al Franken relative to her position on Biden. Gillibrand says the cases were very different because "there were eight credible allegations corroborated in real time" against Franken (whatever "real time" means). Then she repeats what she's said many times, that she needed to not "stay silent" about the Franken accusations because she had a duty to make sure her sons knew that "it's not OK to grope a woman anywhere on her body without her consent" (emphasis added).

This is a good time to watch the clip above. Not the Sam Bee part; the uncomfortable-to-watch Biden-groping-women part. Clearly some of those people do not consent.

Matthews then closes:

Matthews: Should he quit?

Gillibrand: It's something he's going to have to talk about and understand what's happening....

Matthews: Do you call on him to leave the race?

Gillibrand: No, I do not, and what I’m saying now is that it’s something he’s going to have to address. And the truth is, we as a country have to decide if we value women at all.

Read the two sentences immediately above. This is beyond shameful, and way beyond stupid. Does she think no one has ears?

Gillibrand is not the only Democrat to come to Biden's rescue. Nancy Pelosi: "I don't think it's disqualifying." Sen. Tammy Baldwin: "There’s a failure to understand how one’s actions impact others." Sen. Jeanne Shaheen: "I was surprised by the allegation.... All of us, including the vice president, need to continue to work on changing our culture."

From all of this, the path to forgiveness for Biden is clear: Say you "understand" and move on. The voters may not forgive him for his misdeeds, but the leaders of the Democratic Party already have.

Why Is Biden Defended? Explanation 1, It's Generational

Which leads us to ask, why is Biden so well defended by Party leaders and insiders? The reason most often offered is "it's generational." Let's call this Explanation 1.

Here's how EJ Dickson put it in Rolling Stone:

To an extent, this line of debate ["I don't think it's disqualifying"] is to be expected from old-school, establishment Dems like Feinstein and Pelosi, who have clear-cut reasons for standing behind a peer like Biden. But their refusal to outright condemn his alleged behavior is also representative of a generational gap in the #MeToo movement, between those who take quote-unquote “less egregious” violations seriously, and those who do not. Although the allegations against Biden are not of a criminal or even overtly sexual nature, they still involve the issue of consent, and whether or not a man invading a woman’s personal space qualifies as a career-ending transgression.

This generational gap is not specific to the political realm; indeed, there is substantial data to suggest that a chasm exists between the views of older and younger women across the board. A BuzzFeed survey in partnership with Ipsos, for instance, found that while 42% of people between the ages of 18 and 34 said that the #MeToo movement changed the way they thought about consent, only 29% of people over the age of 55 agreed. Similarly, while 64% of people between the ages of 18 and 34 said that women who accuse men of sexual assault and harassment should always be believed, 38% of people over the age of 55 said the same. An NPR poll found a significant gap between older and younger respondents who agreed with the statement that the #MeToo movement had gone too far, while nearly half of older Americans said they didn’t understand what crossed the line in terms of sexual harassment.

While these survey results didn’t differentiate between older and younger women specifically, anecdotally, many younger women report a stark contrast between their own views and the views their mothers and grandmothers share on the movement. In a Time piece on the so-called #MeToo generational divide, a 25-year-old woman says that “the women in my generation have been drawing a much harsher line for anything they consider even slightly inappropriate,” while her mother is quoted as saying that she believes Gen Y and Gen Z feminists like her daughter “are losing the high ground and allies through their absolutism.” Similarly, when discussing the allegations against Biden with her mother, a friend told me that her mother had responded “exactly the way I thought she would”: by saying, “’I think men of that age just do that and don’t mean it to be weird or sexual'” (essentially, the Feinstein/Pelosi school of thought toward inappropriate workplace conduct).

Shorter Rolling Stone: "The rules have changed for younger women." (Note the element of criticism of this view in the article: "Gen Y and Gen Z feminists like her daughter 'are losing the high ground and allies through their absolutism.'" In other words, holding men to this standard is a mistake.)

Explanation 2, He's Our Only Hope

The "it's generational" may explain some voters' responses to Biden, but I don't think it explains the defense of Biden we're reading about. Note that most of his defenders inhabit the same corner of the world — they are people with power and influence in the Democratic Party plus their strongest supporters within the media.

Reaction from those who are less Party-aligned has been more mixed. The Atlantic: "Don't Defend Him as a Flirt." Gawker: "Joe Biden, We Need to Talk About the Way You Touch Women." Even the New York Times: "He is a product of his time, but that time is up."

So why the defense coming from Party officials? The Gawker piece linked above provides a hint: "Try this," Sam Biddle writes, "look at all of those photos and imagine, say, Paul Ryan's face instead of Biden's."

Or Bernie Sanders' face.

So let's be plain. We're coming into the 2020 election season and on the Democratic side there's a lot at stake — in effect, control of the Democratic Party itself from its very top.

As he did in 2016, Bernie Sanders is threatening a palace coup, a takeover of the Party that bypasses all the layers below the presidency — the Speaker's chair, Senate caucus leadership, chair of the DNC, all of it. As the Party's presidential candidate, he will have nominal control of the levers of Party power. As president he will have as much control of the country as he wishes to exercise, even if the leaders of both parties try to block him.

In the past, progressives — and by that I mean real reformers in the Bernie Sanders mold — have been remarkably ineffective in their own #resistance to Party leadership. At every turn, in every local election through 2016 and into 2018, every contest that threatened to put an actual progressive in power was fought bitterly by Party leadership via their control of the donor network, the DCCC, the DSCC, and their allies in other institutions of mainstream Party power, including the media. Some of these resistance candidates succeeded, a great many did not.

The single strongest breakthrough occurred in 2018, when a small group of aggressive progressives, reformers like Occasio-Cortez and others, defeated Party-approved candidates then showed themselves capable as a group of challenging its leaders on their own turf — from inside the halls of power.

Thanks to those victories and their continued opposition to leaders, progressive office-holders have gained some momentum, but not nearly enough. The Green New Deal is now a "thing" being discussed by voters, as is Medicare For All. But the pushback by Nancy Pelosi and other entrenched Party leaders has been fierce, corrupt and underhanded. Even Barack Obama is getting into the act. So even with a Democratic Senate, neither of these proposals is likely to be enacted soon.

The message in all this to progressives is simple: Don't threaten the status quo. The reason: The status quo enriches and empowers us. We're inside and you're not. We mean to stay in charge. Go away.

Seen this way, a Sanders or Warren presidency threatens forty years of entrenched, neoliberal, insider-led and inbred Party power, the very power a great many voters want freedom from, if only they could manage it.

So where is Joe Biden in all this? If you examine all of the viable Democratic presidential candidates (including Biden himself, who hasn't declared yet), they fall neatly into two groups — those opposed to the Obama-era status quo, rebels or "change" candidates; and those whose future depends on returning to that status quo, "faux-change" or "no-change" candidates. If you're a "change" voter this time around, none of the non-rebels is even close to a choice, at least in the primary.

Beto O'Rourke? He wanted to cut Social Security. Kamala Harris? She sent poor mothers to prison because their kids skipped school. Pete Buttigieg? He's an "all lives matter" kind of guy. Also this. Joe Biden? There's too much wrong with him to begin to list.

It's a very neat grouping — Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on the one hand, all the rest on the other — and the 2020 Democratic primary will be, as it already is, an epic battle between the forces behind these two groups. The forces behind the change candidates are mainly outside the Party — voters and a handful of rebellious elected officials. The forces behind all the others are inside the Party and close to its center — mainstream Democratic leaders and those who keep them in power.

It should therefore be obvious that mainstream Party forces badly need a "Sanders (or Warren) stopper" — or, to borrow their own language, a kind of "Sanders killer": As Axios writes, "One prominent [Biden] backer thinks Biden will run, and 'is ready to kill Bernie.'"

If you accept all this, now consider the polling:

Results of a March 5, 2019 Morning Consult poll (source)

One can almost hear their cries: "Who will save us from these meddlesome candidates?" The choices, at least so far, aren't promising. To date the only person positioned to knock off Sanders, or Warren should she surge, is Joe Biden. Kamala Harris, the nearest to either, is polling a quarter of what Sanders is polling, with the rest of the field well behind her.

Joe Biden, it would seem, is their strongest hope, perhaps their only one.

Are mainstream Democrats protecting him for that reason? From their lockstep defense of him, and the genuinely existential threat they face in the next election, I'd bet on it.

If you doubt me, put Bernie Sanders' face on those Biden photos — and imagine what Nancy Pelosi would be saying then.
  

Does Kirsten Gillibrand Consider Joe Biden's Behavior "Disqualifying"? Someone Should Ask Her

Jake Tapper: "Do you think [Biden's behavior toward women] is disqualifying for him?" Lucy Flores: "For me it's disqualifying."

by Thomas Neuburger

Listen to the clip above in which Lucy Flores talks with CNN's Jake Tapper about Joe Biden's "completely inappropriate" behavior toward her and other women. It certainly sounds from Tapper's remarks that Joe Biden is very likely to announce his presidential campaign soon.

It also sounds like there's a certina "protect Biden" edge to some of Tapper's questions — especially from his use of the entirely inapplicable quote from Henry Muñoz, co-founder of the Latino Victory Project and the sponsor of the event at which Biden and Flores appeared (8:32 in the clip). Muñoz states that "at no time were [Flores and Biden] along together." Since Flores clearly said the event occurred in the presence of other people, no one is contesting that. Why Tapper used that quote is beyond me.

From this, it's possible to conclude that the establishment is circling the wagons around Biden, a mistake if that's true. But it is an indication, if a small one, that Biden may be the person the anti-Bernie, anti-Warren alliance is putting their money on in the primary.

If you haven't yet, do read Flores' article with her original allegations ("An Awkward Kiss Changed How I Saw Joe Biden"). Then consider, if Bernie Sanders had engaged in this kind of behavior, would the establishment media, from CNN to MSNBC to Fox, not immediately declare the behavior "disqualifying" without even stopping to post it as a question?

What Does Kirsten Gillibrand Think of Joe Biden's Treatment of Women?

But I want to make a different point here. Some enterprising reporter should ask Kirsten Gillibrand, who made it her mission to remove Al Franken from the Senate for doing things like this...

The now-famous Al Franken–Leeann Tweeden photo

...if she thinks Biden should withdraw from the race and stand down for doing what Lucy Flores said he did in her article.

Seriously. Ask her. She's made this one of her signature issues, so it's an entirely appropriate question.
The answer, I'm certain, will be absolutely revealing.

Biden Being Creepy

To add fuel to that fire, the need to ask Gillibrand about Joe Biden's behavior, here are a few more "Biden being Biden" photos. There are a great many more of these images; this is just a sample.

This is the image that accompanies the Flores article in The Cut. It doesn't depict the event Flores recounts, but notice the position of Biden's right hand on Eva Longoria.

Click here for an image of Biden sniffing Eva Longoria's hair at the same event.

The next shows Joe Biden with Ash Carter's wife at his swearing-in ceremony as Secretary of Defence. She wasn't even onstage until Biden motioned her up to join him. Then he fondled her shoulders and sniffed and kissed her hair.

RT @AboveTopSecret: Creepy #JoeBiden What are you up to with Stephanie Carter, wife of the new Secretary of Defense? pic.twitter.com/l2bAhStCE0

— Rob Stockman (@HngOver) February 17, 2015

And for something truly creepy, here's Joe Biden with his son Beau Biden's wife at Beau Biden's funeral:

And again at Beau Biden's lying-in-state ceremony:

Does Kirsten Gillibrand find this behavior appropriate? Does she find it "disqualifying" for Biden as a presidential candidate?

Someone (brave) should ask her.
 

Another Dirty Old Man For President?

Supposedly "everyone" knows that Biden is a dirty handsy old man who doesn't even understand what it means to be respectful of women he comes in close proximity to. But "everyone" doesn't really mean every person, of course. It just means people who care enough of insider politics to pay close attention. Biden must have been contemplating what would hit him-- and how much apologizing he would be forced to do-- in a #MeToo era. (I can hardly wait to see him and Kirsten Gillibrand debate it face to face... if she dares.) But last week, former Nevada legislator Lucy Flores wrote a first person account how creepy "Uncle Joe" Biden was when he was "helping" her campaign for Lieutenant Governor a couple of years ago.

This is how she described the dirty old man who is trying to be president again based on his newish image as the Obama guy. "And we have no prior relationship. We’re not friends. There’s no relationship whatsoever. And then he begins to not only touch me but get really inappropriately close. And then lean in, and smell my hair and kiss my head... He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head. My brain couldn’t process what was happening. I was embarrassed. I was shocked. I was confused... I just froze. I didn’t know what to do. Because again the only thing that you’re processing is that there is a very powerful man standing next to you. That person is there to campaign on your behalf and you just don’t know how to respond. I mean that’s how I felt. I literally just didn’t even know what to do other than just wish the moment away."

Biden's spokesperson-- he rarely speaks for himself for some reason-- said he can't recall the incident. Lucy Flores does speak for herself and she said that "He probably doesn’t remember the interaction. I would argue that he is so used to behaving in that way that it is no big deal."

On Friday evening at Vox, Laura McGann reminded her readers that Lucy Flores is correct. Biden's got a long history of touching women inappropriately and that the media gave him a pass for years but surely won't if he runs for president. It's always "Biden being Biden" and women aren't going to accept that this year or next.

Biden, 76, arrived in Washington at the age of 30. His substantial public record includes a mixed history on women’s issues, a legacy that makes his in-person conduct even more worthy of discussion.

Lisa Lerer unpacked his history on abortion for the New York Times, reporting that Biden, who is now pro-abortion rights, has not been a solid liberal on the issue for his whole career.

In the Reagan era, Biden voted for a bill in committee that the National Abortion Rights Action League called “the most devastating attack yet on abortion rights.” Biden, who is Catholic, said at the time: “I’m probably a victim, or a product, however you want to phrase it, of my background.” He called the decision “the single most difficult vote I’ve cast as a U.S. senator.”

Biden also held the opinion that the Supreme Court went “too far” in deciding Roe v. Wade. In an interview in 1974, he said he did not think a woman should have the “sole right to say what should happen to her body.”

Biden declined to speak with Lerer for her article, so we don’t know exactly how and why he evolved on Roe. A spokesperson for Biden did not respond to an email asking for comment.

In his years in Washington, though, Biden has voted for pro-abortion rights bills. He’s championed the Violence Against Women Act. And he’s spoken forcefully about the problem of sexual violence.

If Biden runs, he’ll occupy a lane in the Democratic primary as the “normal” candidate-- a likable white guy who won’t lose it on Twitter, or pander to Russia, or throw children in cages at the border.

As Democrats grapple with the intense desire to beat Trump in 2020, many are anxious that a woman will have a tough time beating him because of sexist attitudes still held by some voters. Perhaps, the thinking goes, it’s better to go with the kind of leader that Americans are used to. Biden, who was in office for eight years under Obama, could fit that bill.

But Biden would still have to present a clear contrast to Trump. While Biden has not been accused of sexual assault (as Trump has a dozen times) and there are no tapes of Biden on the Internet joking about grabbing women by the genitals, there are tapes of Biden behaving inappropriately. One man’s behavior is far worse, but that doesn’t excuse the other.

Democrats are conflicted about what to do about this category of behavior. It’s not the same as what other men of the #MeToo movement have bee accused of, but it’s also not what liberals want to endorse. Sen. Al Franken’s resignation is still controversial for this reason. Some Democrats feel the party is putting itself at a disadvantage against Republicans, who let the president get away with far worse than any accusation Franken faced.

Flores confronts the issue of whether some bad behavior is okay, forcing us to consider what these seemingly small incidents are really like. “The vice-president of the United States of America had just touched me in an intimate way reserved for close friends, family, or romantic partners-- and I felt powerless to do anything about it.”

The Democratic Party is more than half women. More women than ever in history ran as Democrats in the 2018 elections-- and won. They outperformed their male peers. They were central to Democrats retaking the House. Women are leading the sustained resistance to Trump. The party should be committed to making sure that women and girls participate in government and politics to their fullest potential. The party needs them.

On Saturday, Marc Caputo, writing for Politico, noted Status Quo Joe "is enduring the roughest stretch of any candidate in the Democratic presidential primary, and he’s not even a candidate yet. In a two-week period where his attempts to smooth a path into the 2020 race only seemed to underscore the obstacles confronting his prospective candidacy, the former vice president got a concentrated dose of what’s in store for him if he chooses to embark on a third run for the White House.

“Biden’s record is at odds with where the Democratic party is in 2020,” said Rebecca Katz, a progressive consultant who advised Cynthia Nixon's primary campaign against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. “Primaries are tough, and Joe Biden, when you’re this old and running for president, you have a pretty long record for people to go through.

Biden says he doesn't recall grabbing anyone's boobs intentionally

[A] picture from the event also shows Biden also burying his nose in the hair of actress and activist Eva Longoria. Katz, a former staffer in the U.S. Senate-- where Biden had served for 36 years before becoming President Obama’s vice president in 2009-- said it was easy to believe Flores’ accusations.

“The thing that’s so challenging for team Biden is that everything that Lucy Flores said seems very, very true,” Katz said. “There’s literally highlight reels of Biden, whether it’s with world leaders or granddaughters of incoming members of Congress, doing things that seem a little off-- on camera.”

...Republicans and Democrats alike are already laying the groundwork to face Biden by examining the business deals of his son, Hunter Biden, when Biden was vice president. It’s an issue of such grave concern to Joe Biden, who lost his other son Beau Biden to cancer, that he has told close associates it’s a major factor in deciding whether to run.

To start off the week, the conservative website One America News Network featured a report Monday about Hunter Biden’s ties to a Ukrainian oligarch and a natural-gas company in 2014, an arrangement that was also criticized a year later in a New York Times editorial.

As with the allegations lodged by Flores against Biden, the former vice president must not only determine how to respond, but also how to answer critics who will say Hunter Biden’s business interests make it harder for Biden as a nominee to contrast his record with Trump on the question of ties to Russia.

Trump’s defenders, who have blamed Ukrainian intelligence for some of the Trump-Russia stories, say they look forward to making Democrats pay for it if and when Biden enters the race.

“I’m pretty confident Joe Biden will be called out by his presidential primary competitors for his son getting rich off a corrupt Ukrainian oligarch’s gas company,” said Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign consultant and top Trump defender.

He pointed to a connection with Trump’s former campaign manager that should make Democrats uneasy.

“Wait till they find out Hunter Biden’s oligarch is from the same political party Paul Manafort consulted in Ukraine,” he said. “Old ‘Lunch Bucket Joe’ would be smart to not even get in the race.”

Elizabeth Warren says Biden's got to answer for his inappropriate behavior. All 40 years worth?

Gillibrand Just Learned If Your'e Running An Identity Politics Campaign That Says "Believe Women," It Doesn't Mean "Believe Women When It's Convenient"

You wouldn't believe the number of people asking why DWT has nothing to say about Alex Thompson's reporting on the knock-out punch administered to one of the Democratic also-rans, Kirsten Gillibrand. Thompson's original blockbuster Politico article, Former Gillibrand aide resigned in protest over handling of sex harassment claims, was pretty thorough. A moment of shared national schadenfreude directed at one of America's worst political opportunists. Turns out-- as usual-- the opportunist is also a hypocrite.

While Gilibrand was stoking a brainless war against men for her own zig-zaggy and utterly inauthentic political path-- to nowhere, as it turns out-- one of her staffers was resigning "in protest over the handling of her sexual harassment complaint... criticiz[ing] the senator for failing to abide by her own public standards." POW!

In July, the female staffer alleged one of Gillibrand’s closest aides-- who was a decade her senior and married-- repeatedly made unwelcome advances after the senator had told him he would be promoted to a supervisory role over her. She also said the male aide regularly made crude, misogynistic remarks in the office about his female colleagues and potential female hires.

Less than three weeks after reporting the alleged harassment and subsequently claiming that the man retaliated against her for doing so, the woman told chief of staff Jess Fassler that she was resigning because of the office’s handling of the matter. She did not have another job lined up.

The woman was granted anonymity because she fears retaliation and damage to her future professional prospects.

“I have offered my resignation because of how poorly the investigation and post-investigation was handled,” the woman wrote to Gillibrand in a letter sent on her final day to the senator's personal email account. Copied were general counsel Keith Castaldo and Fassler, who is now managing the senator’s presidential bid.

“I trusted and leaned on this statement that you made: ‘You need to draw a line in the sand and say none of it is O.K. None of it is acceptable.’ Your office chose to go against your public belief that women shouldn’t accept sexual harassment in any form and portrayed my experience as a misinterpretation instead of what it actually was: harassment and ultimately, intimidation,” the woman wrote.

The senator and her staff never responded to the letter.

Gillibrand, who was not made available for an interview [a funny way to say she refused to speak], issued a statement to Politico defending her office’s handling of the incident.

“These are challenges that affect all of our nation’s workplaces, including mine, and the question is whether or not they are taken seriously. As I have long said, when allegations are made in the workplace, we must believe women so that serious investigations can actually take place, we can learn the facts, and there can be appropriate accountability,” she said. “That’s exactly what happened at every step of this case last year. I told her that we loved her at the time and the same is true today.”

Her office said no one responded to the letter because it determined that “engaging again on an already settled personnel matter was not the appropriate course of action.” It said the letter came after she’d given three weeks’ notice, “contained clear inaccuracies and was a major departure from the sentiments she shared with senior staff in her final days in the office.”

Since she left last summer, the woman has been doing part-time contract work. The male aide, Abbas Malik, kept his job.

Two weeks ago, however, Politico presented the office with its own findings of additional allegations of inappropriate workplace conduct by Malik. Among the claims were that he made a “joke” about rape to a female colleague-- a person whom the office had failed to contact last summer despite repeated urgings by Malik’s accuser to reach out to the person.

Gillibrand’s office opened a new investigation and dismissed Malik last week. Malik did not respond to requests for comment.

The episode suggests a disconnect between the senator’s categorical public stance and her office’s private actions. It also points to broader problems with sexual harassment investigations on Capitol Hill: They are usually conducted internally by top aides with pre-existing relationships in the office rather than by an independent third party-- a structure that Gillibrand has criticized in other institutions such as the military. The system can leave Capitol Hill aides ill-served, since those involved in an investigation have a motivation to protect the lawmaker.

And the case highlights the challenges of responding to alleged sexual harassment when it hits home, even for a leader on the issue. Malik had spent years by Gillibrand’s side as her driver-- the senator officiated at his wedding-- while the woman was a more recent hire and had significantly less stature in the office. He was accused not of physical harassment but of making unwanted advances and using demeaning language-- behavior that can be easier to downplay and can require a higher level of diligence to get to the bottom of.

Gillibrand’s advisers said they took the woman’s claims seriously, consulted with Senate employment lawyers for guidance and punished Malik at the time for what they could substantiate. But after “a full and thorough investigation into the evidence, including multiple interviews with current employees who could have witnessed this behavior, the office concluded that the allegations did not meet the standard of sexual harassment,” the office said of its initial internal investigation.

That inquiry, however, left out key former staffers. The aides who led it-- deputy chief of staff Anne Bradley and Castaldo-- did not contact two former employees whom the woman said could corroborate and add to her allegations of inappropriate workplace conduct. Gillibrand’s office interviewed only current employees.

“Anyone doing a thorough investigation would contact any witness that had or was likely to have relevant information, particularly when there is a hostile working environment alleged,” said Les Alderman, an attorney who specializes in sexual harassment in the workplace and represented an alleged victim in a case against former Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Texas) that garnered national attention last year. “The idea that an employer is somehow restricted from contacting former employees who could shed light on the situation is laughable.”

Politico reached out to more than 20 former Gillibrand staffers to see if there was a pattern of behavior by Malik, including the two aides the woman specifically asked the office to contact.

One of those two former staffers said Malik often called her fat and unattractive to her face and made light of sexual abuse. She recalled one instance in which Malik remarked that a particular woman they were talking about “couldn’t get laid unless she was raped.” The person did not report that behavior at the time but now says she wishes she had.

Two more staffers who worked for Gillibrand said the woman’s claims of Malik’s inappropriate workplace behavior matched their own experiences. They said Malik regularly made misogynistic jokes, frequently appraised what they wore, disparaged the looks of other female staffers and rated the attractiveness of women who came in for interviews.

The office also dispensed with the allegations of Malik‘s retaliation without informing the woman of its conclusions or any disciplinary action.

Gillibrand’s office acknowledged it found evidence that Malik had made unspecified inappropriate comments and revoked his expected promotion, which would have come with a raise. It also moved his desk and gave him a final warning. This was not the first time the senator’s top aides dealt with an allegation of bad behavior by Malik: According to a firsthand witness of an incident in 2015, Malik confronted a fellow aide in the office. He got in the man’s face, pushed his desk and threatened to “fucking” hurt him, the witness said, describing the confrontation as “violent.”

But Fassler and Bradley told the woman that her claim of inappropriate advances was a case of “misinterpretation” and too much of a “he said, she said” to warrant Malik‘s dismissal, according to contemporaneous notes taken by the woman. The office did not deny those terms were used but disputed that characterization of the investigation. “This case was never viewed as ‘he said, she said.’ Upon conclusion of the full and thorough investigation, it was determined that the evidence revealed employee misconduct that, while inappropriate, did not constitute sexual harassment,” the office said.

“When I had the courage to speak up about my harasser, I was belittled by her office and treated like an inconvenience,” the woman said of Gillibrand in an interview. “She kept a harasser on her staff until it proved politically untenable for her to do so.”

As part of her freelance work for an events production firm, she staffed the kickoff rally for one of Gillibrand’s rivals in the Democratic presidential primary. She has not done any other work for that or other presidential campaigns, and is not interviewing with any 2020 contenders.

Malik became Gillibrand’s driver in 2011 after serving two tours in the Iraq War. He became such a constant presence in Gillibrand’s life-- he had a set of keys to her home and often drove her children to school with her-- that some staffers dubbed him “the keeper of her purse.” The office changed his title to “military adviser” in 2015 despite his responsibilities remaining largely the same.

Though she said she was put off by Malik’s comments about other female aides, the woman said her dealings with him had been generally cordial. But that changed when Gillibrand told him on July 10, 2018, that she wanted him to direct advance work for her future trips. All the details of the new job hadn’t been settled, but Abbas told the woman that he would be “in charge” of her position, she said.

“I have treated [A]bbas the same the entire year I have worked here,” the woman wrote in a detailed timeline of events that she later sent to Bradley, the deputy chief of staff. “It wasn’t until after this ‘promotion’ that he decided to hit on me.”

According to that timeline and documentation sent to Gillibrand’s office at the time, the alleged harassment started almost immediately after word of the planned promotion, with increasingly aggressive advances. In one late-night text message, Malik told her he now understood the meaning of the clown emoji-- it meant “down to clown,” an innuendo for having sex from the movie Blockers, he elaborated the next morning.

On one day alone, July 13, she said Malik made four unwanted advances, which were all rebuffed. The first occurred alone in the office early in the morning when Malik told the woman he had a secret for her: Her boss had just quit.

“Ugh I shouldn’t have told you. You are totally going to tell people,” he said, according to her notes. “Why do I love you! I should hate you!”

After Malik prodded her for a secret of her own, she said Malik walked up to her desk and asked, “If we had met in a bar would it have happened for us?”

And at a birthday party for another staffer that evening, Malik told her privately that “I thought by debrief you meant you were hitting on me,” referencing an earlier text message.

She asked him if he was kidding. “No, I’m not kidding,” he responded. “[O]h wow ok no I was absolutely not hitting on you,” she replied, according to her timeline. He pressed two more times, prompting the woman to chide him in a text: “You’re married!!” He still sent a string of flirtatious texts later, including one with a clown emoji.

The woman said she tried to stay away from Malik the following week. But he began complaining that she was being mean to him because of his expected promotion, and said that he would give her the silent treatment until she apologized. “This seriously was so upsetting to me because I was not upset about that. I was upset with him sexually harassing me and he is trying to create his own narrative,” she wrote in her timeline.

On July 25, the woman emailed Bradley her detailed recollection of events, which she had written over the previous week. In addition to the advances, the woman claimed that Malik “said derogatory and inappropriate things about women since I started here.” She alleged that Malik called a female colleague “fat” and “ugly,” would rate the appearance of potential hires, and told colleagues that the office’s new fellow-- essentially a young female intern-- “wanted him.”

Bradley immediately looped in Fassler, who called the woman. They both assured her they were taking the accusations seriously. Bradley and Castaldo, the general counsel, immediately went to the Senate’s employment counsel and consulted with it throughout the process, a routine step for Senate offices when confronted with sexual harassment complaints to protect them from liability.

Though it’s common in Congress for top aides to investigate alleged harassment by another office employee, experts in sexual harassment law said the arrangement is inherently unfair to the complainant. Ideally, an independent third party should look into such claims given that staff members have pre-existing relationships that often pose a conflict of interest, they said.

Gillibrand’s office said it had previously explored hiring outside investigators but determined it was "not a realistic or viable option." However, experts said several House offices have taken that step.

“There have been instances when offices have sought out an objective third party to conduct the investigation and that seems to be a method that increases fairness for all parties concerned,” said Kristin Nicholson, a former longtime chief of staff on the Hill and co-founder of Congress Too, an organization of former congressional staffers committed to combating sexual harassment in Congress.

Gillibrand herself has made the case for a similar setup for the military, pushing legislation that would have independent prosecutors-- rather than commanders-- handle allegations of sexual misconduct in the military.

The main mechanism for the woman to bring a complaint outside the Senate office would have been through the Office of Compliance. She visited that office before going to her superiors but found it unhelpful, saying a staffer merely recited language from its website. She also knew that in order to file a complaint she would first have to go through at least 30 days of mediation and likely more. Last year, Gillibrand called that a “daunting requirement,” while pushing to reform the compliance office.

So the woman turned to Gillibrand’s aides. In addition to the senator’s public stance on the issue, the office had required staffers to undergo three training sessions the previous year on sexual harassment prevention, including one in early July.

When she learned on July 30 that the office had disciplined but not fired Malik, the woman was upset. But at the time, she trusted that the office did all it could. “I felt satisfied there had been a fair process,” she recounted in her resignation letter.

That appraisal, however, began to change the next morning when Bradley entered the woman’s office and told her that Malik was upset. “Wouldn’t you be?” Bradley said, according to notes of the conversation the woman emailed to herself immediately afterward.

The woman said Malik should be feeling remorseful. But Bradley said Malik felt that losing his potential promotion was too harsh a punishment. She also said Fassler, the chief of staff, had said Malik was “lucky” because the office could have fired him for many reasons.

A few hours later, the woman met with Bradley in Gillibrand’s office and asked Bradley why Malik hadn’t been dismissed if there were other grounds for firing him. Fassler then called and was put on speakerphone. He said Bradley’s remarks to her were “inappropriate” and tried to explain his comment by saying he had reasons to fire everyone in the office, including her. That further upset her.

The woman then pressed Bradley on why the office did not reach out to the former employees she had said could speak to Malik’s behavior. Bradley told her that lawyers recommended not contacting former employees, according to contemporaneous notes of the conversation that Gillibrand’s office said were “not accurate.”

Robbie Kaplan, a co-founder of the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund, spoke with Politico last week at the request of Gillibrand’s office. While Kaplan declined to speak on the record about this particular case, she said the decision whether to interview former employees varies from case to case depending on the facts and circumstances. “It’s always possible to look back and criticize with the benefit of hindsight,” Kaplan said.

Knowing she was upset, Fassler called the woman back, apologized, and tried to affirm that she was satisfied with the outcome of the investigation, according to another email the woman wrote to herself that documented the conversation.

The woman said she had felt fine until her conversation with Bradley. Fassler said she must have just misinterpreted Bradley, to which she retorted: “I’m getting tired of people saying I’m misinterpreting things.”

Later that evening, the woman noticed that Malik did not update her when Gillibrand decided not to go to a softball game and then the next morning did not tell her that the senator was running behind schedule. She went to her bosses and said Malik was making her job more difficult in response to her reporting him. Though Gillibrand’s office contends such updates weren’t required, Malik had regularly given the woman and others in the office notice in the past.

Bradley consulted the Senate employment counsel again and Gillibrand’s office determined “that no retaliation had occurred and that no disciplinary action was appropriate.” It added that “in one verbal conversation, [Fassler] proactively told her they looked into it and to let him know if anything continued.”

Beyond that, Bradley and Fassler did not update the woman on the specific steps taken, the conclusions of the investigation, or any disciplinary action. That made her think the office didn’t take her complaint seriously.

Bradley exacerbated that feeling when she accidentally sent the woman an email intended for Fassler. “I get the impression she is trying to divide and concur [sic]. After today, neither of us should meet with her alone,” Bradley wrote, mistakenly believing that the woman had gone to Fassler alone with her complaint.

Gillibrand’s office argued it made many efforts to make the woman feel supported. Bradley and Fassler regularly checked in with her and assured her they “believed” her even if they did not dismiss Malik. Fassler canceled a meeting in which she and Malik would have had to be in the same room, and he talked to her about other opportunities in the office-- positions she considered demotions-- if she no longer wanted to work in her current role, which required her to interact with Malik.

And after the harassment investigation ended but before she quit, Gillibrand approached the woman and tried to console her with a quick hug and a “We love you.” The woman considered it an empty gesture.

On Aug. 13, the woman told Fassler that she would resign and cited the office’s handling of the investigation. As she thought about the decision earlier that morning, the woman explained to a friend that “[Malik] was using his position and relationship with the senator to solicit me. I acted the same as I always had: friendly, kind, outgoing, inclusive. But this time he decided to read it as me wanting him,” according to a copy of the email.

She recalled that Fassler reacted defensively about the office’s handling of the allegations and told her that she had also committed fireable offenses during her time in the office. One comment by Fassler that particularly galled her, she said, was that investigation found that she had “fed” Malik alcohol while he was on duty as a driver. In her claim, she wrote that she and Malik had grabbed a quick drink in the courtyard of the Capitol late one afternoon to talk about the office. She was frustrated that Fassler was blaming her given that Malik is an adult capable of deciding what to consume.

“I felt as though I was being belittled, insulted and intimidated even when I was trying to quit,” she wrote in her resignation letter.

Gillibrand’s office acknowledged the exchange but said Fassler was obligated to raise what it called “an unrelated office policy violation” with the woman, referring to the alcohol incident. The office said Fassler, throughout the case, “repeatedly demonstrated his respect and gratitude for the employee, and he was grateful she came forward.”

Fassler asked her to reconsider resigning and then offered to allow her to stay until she found a new job so she could keep her health benefits.

She decided to leave. In her final days at the office, the woman agonized over whether to send the letter to Gillibrand. Doing so would almost certainly burn bridges and likely hurt her professional prospects in the clubby world of national politics.

It was Gillibrand’s female-focused advocacy that had made the woman want to work for her in the first place. For years, the senator has positioned herself at the forefront of fighting sexual misconduct in the military and in Congress. She wrote in Fortune last April that “Congress has a sexual harassment problem-- and isn’t taking it seriously,” and helped push through legislation to overhaul the institution’s practices.

“Whether it’s in the military, a college campus, the NFL, corporate America, or the halls of Congress, survivors of harassment too often continue to be disbelieved, blamed, and even retaliated against,” Gillibrand wrote. "This stops when we value all people-- women and men who are harassed-- and when we listen, believe them, and create a system in which justice is possible.”

Gillibrand has made her advocacy for women the animating cause of her presidential bid-- which the woman had hoped to work on-- describing her approach to the Democratic primary as “women plus.”

“Our campaign is confronting the toxic culture of sexism and misogyny in our political system,” a Facebook ad last month read. “We’re fighting for women to be heard. We’re fighting to be valued.”

But the woman said the rhetoric belies her own experience. She is now considering a career outside of politics and far away from Washington.

Gillibrand has consistently polled between zero and 1% in her catastrophic and ill-starred campaign for the presidency. Monday evening she tried-- unsuccessfully-- to defend her office's pathetic investigation, calling it "thorough and complete" and "thorough and professional" and said she has no regrets. Let's ask her again when she drops out of the race.