High-profile female Democrats are jockeying behind the scenes to become 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden’s running mate while remaining largely silent on his accuser, Tara Reade.
Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams is overtly campaigning to become Biden’s running mate, according to a Politico report Tuesday, telling reporters that she would be an “excellent running mate” and privately calling Democratic power brokers asking them to tell the Biden campaign that she should be his pick for vice president, according to labor leaders familiar with the conversations.
Biden committed in March that he would select a woman to be his running mate.
Abrams said earlier in April on ABC’s “The View” that she had “concerns” that Biden might not choose a black woman to become his running mate.
Biden’s former competitors, Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Kamala Harris of California and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, have been more guarded about their desire to be selected as his running mate, according to Politico.
Warren, who said in mid-April that she would say yes if Biden offered her the opportunity to become his vice president, has taken it upon herself to solicit donations for Biden’s campaign during media appearances, moves that one Biden adviser told Politico were made without direction from the campaign.
And Harris, who also said in mid-April she would be “honored” to serve as Biden’s vice president, participated in a virtual town hall with the Biden campaign on Monday. Klobuchar has also participated in a virtual town hall with the Biden campaign.
Of the four vice presidential prospects, only Klobuchar has publicly addressed allegations made by Reade, a former Senate staffer who worked for Biden in 1993 and has accused him of penetrating her with his fingers without her consent. (RELATED: Three Female Potential Biden VPs Appeared On Sunday Shows. They Were Not Asked About Tara Reade)
Klobuchar told MSNBC in mid-April about Reade’s allegation: “I think this case has been investigated. I know the vice president as a major leader on domestic abuse, I worked with him on that.”
Democratic presidential candidates Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) greet people before marching in the annual Bloody Sunday March across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on March 1, 2020. (JOSHUA LOTT/AFP via Getty Images)
The Biden campaign has denied Reade’s allegation, saying it “absolutely did not happen.”
But footage of Reade’s mother calling into CNN’s “Larry King Live” in 1993 asking for advice about her daughter’s problems with a “prominent senator” surfaced on Friday. Reade confirmed to the Daily Caller News Foundation on Friday that the woman speaking in the unearthed CNN segment was indeed her now-deceased mother.
Reade lashed out at the vice-presidential hopefuls by name for remaining silent on her allegations.
“[W]hat I would like to say to them at this point and some of the silence from some of the candidates Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren that at this point, if you continue to silence me, if you continue to engage in protecting a powerful man without giving my case a closer look, you are complicit in rape,” Reade said.
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