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EXCLUSIVE: Group Working To Confirm Trump’s SCOTUS Nominees Lets Loose On NYT’s Biden Story

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An advocacy group that helps to confirm and defend President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees is railing against what it said is The New York Times’ lack of objectivity and conservative bias.

TheNYT’s work downplaying the allegations against former Vice President Joe Biden is a black mark on the paper’s legacy, according to The Article III Project, an advocacy group that works to support Trump’s judicial nominees.

The group lashed out at NYT Executive Editor Dean Baquet in a letter Friday obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“The conservative readership of the Times, not to mention many conservative former Times readers, will have no trouble solving this riddle,” the group wrote after posing a hypothetical scenario in which the paper jumps on top of one story about a conservative judge while waiting weeks to mention sexual allegations leveled against a Democrat running for president.

“That’s a problem. Not just for the New York Times, not just for the falsely accused, and not just for disbelieved and discounted accusers, but for America. It is a problem when our ‘newspaper of record,’ which should be a bastion of objectivity, instead lives down to the President’s nickname for it: failing,” the group added.

Ed Rollins, a GOP campaign consultant and former senior adviser for former President Ronald Reagan, was one of several conservative heavyweights who signed the letter.

Democratic presidential hopeful former US vice president Joe Biden makes a point as he and Senator Bernie Sanders take part in the 11th Democratic Party 2020 presidential debate in a CNN Washington Bureau studio in Washington, DC on March 15, 2020. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

Democratic presidential hopeful former US vice president Joe Biden (MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

TheNYT received troves of criticism after the paper wrote a report Sunday telling the story of Tara Reade, a former Biden staffer who alleges that he sexually assaulted her in 1993 while he was a senator for Delaware.

The story was edited to nix a section mentioning past allegations against the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate. (RELATED: NYT Says It Didn’t Find Any Sexual Misconduct By Biden, Beyond Past Reports Of His Unwanted Hugs And Kisses)

“No other allegation about sexual assault surfaced in the course of our reporting, nor did any former Biden staff corroborate Reade’s allegation. We found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Biden, beyond hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable,” TheNYT noted.

The second half of the sentence was later edited to remove the second sentence mentioning “hugs and kisses.” Baquet later admitted in an interview with NYT columnist Ben Smith that the report was edited after the Biden campaign complained about the sentence structure.

“Even though a lot of us, including me, had looked at it before the story went into the paper, I think that the campaign thought that the phrasing was awkward and made it look like there were other instances in which he had been accused of sexual misconduct,” Baquet said.

Biden is denying the allegations.

The Article III Project also railed against TheNYT for leaping onto a story about Julie Swetnick, who accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his September 2018 confirmation hearings of participating in gang rapes. The group asked why the paper treated the accusations against Biden differently.

“We understand that when a woman accuses a powerful conservative man of sexual assault, it’s breaking news worth reporting even if ‘none of [the] claims [can] be independently corroborated,'” the group wrote before adding: “We understand that when a woman accuses a powerful liberal man of sexual assault, it’s a ‘really sensitive story’.”

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