US presidential candidate Joe Biden on Friday emphatically denied sexually assaulting a former staffer, saying the incident she claims occurred 27 years ago “never happened.”

“They aren’t true. This never happened,” Biden said in a statement regarding the accusations made by Tara Reade, a former staffer in his US Senate office.

Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, broke a month of silence on the accusations with his statement.

The 77-year-old said Reade’s then-supervisor and former senior staffers in his office “have said, unequivocally, that she never came to them and complained or raised issues.”

Read, now 56, said on a podcast in March that the former senator and vice president put his hands “down my skirt” and violated her.

She has since recounted her story to other media outlets, and filed an incident report with the Washington police in early April — seen by AFP — in which she did not name Biden.

Other women have accused Biden of touching them inappropriately in the past, and Reade’s initial claims were similar — and less severe than her most recent allegations

Biden also went on a morning news show to proclaim his innocence.

“It is not true. I’m saying unequivocally it never happened, and it didn’t,” Biden told MSNBC.

“I don’t know why after 27 years all of this gets raised,” Biden added. “But I’m not going to question her motive. I’m not going to attack her.”

But he stressed that “I have a right to say, look at the facts. Check it out.”

Reade has not produced a copy of the complaint that she allegedly filed in 1993 after the incident, and Biden said he has asked officials to search the National Archives, where he says any such document would now reside.

He also said his papers, held at the University of Delaware, “do not contain personnel files.”

Biden, who has pledged to pick a woman to be his vice president, has stressed he has worked his entire political career to improve conditions for women, including authoring the Violence Against Women Act.

“Women are to be believed, given the benefit of the doubt, if they come forward and say something happened to them,” he told MSNBC.

“Then you have to look at the circumstances and the facts.” “The truth matters,” he said. “These claims are not true.”

(AFP)

US President Donald Trump has called his Democratic rival Joe Biden “incompetent,” rejecting polls which show the former vice president was leading in the race for the White House.

“I don’t believe the polls,” Trump told Reuters on Wednesday. “I believe the people of this country are smart. And I don’t think that they will put a man in who’s incompetent.”

“And I don’t mean incompetent because of a condition that he’s got now. I mean he’s incompetent for 30 years. Everything he ever did was bad. His foreign policy was a disaster,” he continued.

He also touched on Biden’s victory over Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary, saying the Vermont Senator should have won the race.

Trump placed the blame on Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) for Sander’s loss, saying she stayed in the race and prevented Sanders from forming a coalition that could defeat Biden.

“He (Biden) should never have won the primary, ever in a million years, because those votes were taken away. They were taken away from Bernie Sanders. And I think I’m going to get a lot of Bernie Sanders voters,” Trump said.

Trump to launch nationwide advertising blitz targeting Biden

Trump’s re-election campaign plans to roll out a new advertising blitz targeting Biden’s record on China in must-win states for the 2020 election.

The move is seen as part of a bid by the president to reverse a dangerous slide six months out from the election.

Last week, Trump’s political advisers told him about internal polling which showed the Republican president trailing Biden in battleground states.

The polling also indicated that an initial surge in support for Trump over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic has weakened.

This comes as Biden and his campaign have been unloading ads accusing Trump of weakness on China, where the coronavirus originally spread. They have also spoken during a series of local television interviews in swing states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, criticizing the president for his mishandling of the virus crisis.

Speaking with Reuters, TJ Ducklo, Biden’s campaign spokesman, asked, “How does the Trump campaign defend the worst failure of presidential leadership in modern history that costs thousands of Americans their lives?”

The Trump campaign’s new video highlights the president’s decisions to ban most travel from China and Europe during the coronavirus outbreak, which has so far affected more than 1,089,000 and killed over 63,500 in the US.

The ad, seen by Reuters ahead of its release, also targets Biden for earlier remarks that travel restrictions were ineffective and for calling Trump “xenophobic” and “fear-mongering.”

Sex assault allegation poses challenge for Biden’s presidential campaign

Biden’s presidential campaign is currently grappling with sexual assault allegations against him after his former Senate staffer Tara Reade accused him of assaulting her in the basement of a Capitol Hill office building in the 1990s.

Although his campaign has denied the allegation first made more than a month ago, the story attracted fresh attention this week after two of Reade’s associates said she had previously told them about elements of her allegations.

The story also has fueled attacks by Republicans, who are concerned about Trump’s political standing, but now are taking advantage of the allegation, trying to depict Democrats as hypocrites who only defend women who allege wrongdoing against conservatives.

Meanwhile, top Democrats have come out in support of Biden against allegations, saying that women have the right to be heard but that they do not believe the allegations.

Two powerful Democratic women — Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), a former rival to Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination, and Stacey Abrams, a top candidate to be Biden’s running mate — have come to Biden’s defense.

“I know Joe Biden, and I think he’s telling the truth and this did not happen,” Abrams said on CNN.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has also backed Biden over the allegation, telling reporters that there was never any record of the assault.

“The happiest day for me this week was to support Joe Biden for President of the United States,” she said in her first in-person press conference at the Capitol in weeks.

Several other women accused Biden last year of inappropriate touching. Biden apologized to them, saying he would adjust his behavior.

Source: Presstv