In a sane world, Tara Reade’s claim that Joe Biden sexually assaulted her should have ended with news that she had edited an old post on her Medium blog to more closely match her allegations against Biden. What is more, she did so mere hours before going public, and while she’d been promoting her original version of events—that Biden had merely been too handsy for comfort—as late as February.
By all rights, in the absence of a really good explanation from Reade, this should have spelled curtains, finis, sayonara to her credibility. But incredibly, Reade’s defenders don’t seem to understand how egregious this is. For much of Saturday, they have claimed that she was merely clarifying her original story.
Let’s say it nice and slow, folks—if that’s the case, why didn’t she simply do a new post? Given how much the edits completely changed her story, there’s no reason that I know of to simply edit the old one. None that allows her to look good, that is. The way she edited it made it appear she was saying the same thing when she first wrote that post in 2019—which is incredibly misleading at best.
To those who point out others have corroborated Reade’s story, the changes leave you wondering which story she told. Those kinds of questions are exactly what can blow apart attempts to bring criminals to justice—even when by real-world standards, they’re manifestly guilty. There’s a reason that convictions based on perjured testimony are an almost automatic reversal on appeal.
When I was looking at parallels to this situation, I found myself thinking back to a Mafia case that should be all too familiar to most of the New Yorkers here, especially those from Brooklyn.
Back in 2006, then-Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes indicted former FBI agent Lin DeVecchio was indicted on charges that he helped Colombo family capo Gregory Scarpa kill four people from 1984 to 1992 by leaking confidential FBI information about them. DeVecchio, the former head of the FBI’s “Colombo Squad,” had been forced to retire in disgrace in 1996 in the face of evidence that he’d leaked information to Scarpa on numerous occasions.
Scarpa had been a confidential FBI informant for three decades, and DeVecchio had been his handler for most of the 1980s and 1990s. Selwyn Raab’s extensive book on the Mafia, “Five Families,” reveals that DeVecchio may have been one of the most corrupt agents in FBI history. He told Scarpa about a number of Colombo soldiers who had flipped, and helped Scarpa track down soldiers who were supporting Victor Orena’s bid to seize control of the family from longtime boss Carmine “The Snake” Persico,” who was still ruling the family while serving life in prison.
It had been obvious for some time that DeVecchio was corrupt, and there had been some pretty strong indications that he was, at the very least, an accessory to murder. Indeed, a number of Colombo soldiers had murder convictions overturned or charges thrown out after arguing that DeVecchio’s role in helping Scarpa hunt down and kill Orena supporters irrevocably tainted their cases. The mafiosi argued that DeVecchio’s actions made any murders they committed acts of self-defense.
But this appeared to be the first time that prosecutors could prove DeVecchio was indeed directly responsible for murders. However, the case rested almost entirely on the word of Scarpa’s former girlfriend, Linda Schiro. Although Schiro had previously downplayed DeVecchio’s role in interviews with the FBI and other investigators, her revelation that DeVecchio was involved seemingly gave prosecutors enough to go forward.
But just four days after Schiro testified, the case all but ended when Tom Robbins of The Village Voice revealed that he and Mafia reporter Jerry Capeci had sat down with Schiro in 1997 and asked her about DeVecchio’s involvement in the murders. Schiro said—on tape—that DeVecchio wasn’t involved in the murders. Robbins and Capeci had promised Schiro that her revelations would only appear in a book they were working on at the time, and even then would not be attributed to her. However, Robbins said, the prospect of DeVecchio being sent to prison for life meant that he could not ethically keep that promise.
What happened next was anticlimatic. Within 24 hours of both prosecutors and defense lawyers listening to the tapes, the case was dismissed. There really was no other option. No ethical prosecutor could have allowed this case to go on when the star witness has been exposed as a potential perjurer.
The parallels between Schiro and Reade are staggering. You don’t send someone to prison for life based on the word of someone who says one thing to prosecutors after saying something completely different to reporters. Likewise, you don’t blow up a presidential campaign on the word of someone who edits an old post to match new allegations rather than make a new post about them.
Had this been a criminal investigation, if this had come up, any prosecutor with an iota of decency would have done the same thing that Brooklyn prosecutors did with Schiro. He or she would demand an explanation for this from Reade—and without such an explanation, would dismiss the charges.
If there is any sort of investigation—by the DNC or anything else—this ought to be the first question asked of Reade. And if she cannot or will not answer it, that should be the end of matters. To do anything else would be as wrong as sweeping sexual assault and domestic violence under the rug.