“It would be a very different thing if I could testify under oath,” Reade said during an interview with the Daily Caller in December, adding she is willing to “provide whatever information [Congress] needed and [Congress] could ask me whatever questions they wanted.”
“I think we need to have the conversation, instead of me being erased, and other women that were erased that tried to come forward,” Reade said.
When she initially told her story, Reade accused Biden of penetrating her with his fingers after pinning her against a wall. And while Biden staffers from the time did not recall any such incident being reported, Reade claims now that a formal inquiry will reveal they were telling a different story.
She said if they “had to go under oath, I think they would have to admit something very different.”
Reade also said that she dropped efforts to follow up on the initial assault claim she made at the time because of intimidation.
“I was 28 years old, it was scary to hear at the time. It was at the beginning of my political career, and it kind of shut me up,” Reade told the outlet.
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) tweeted at the time that she would support a former inquiry by Congress into the matter.
“Tara Reade has asked the new GOP House to investigate her claims of sexual assault against Joe Biden. I’m for it!” she tweeted.
Reade replied: “Thank you @laurenboebert. Sexual harassment and assault is not a partisan issue.”
Shortly after she made her allegations ahead of the 2020 election, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, who was elected earlier this year to succeed Speaker Nancy Pelosi as House Democratic leader, said Reade was a “serious person” making “serious allegations” that needed to be properly investigated, Fox News reported.
“Multiple people have corroborated parts of Reade’s story since she first spoke out on March 25, 2020, but Biden and his campaign vehemently denied the claims,” the network reported.
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Jeffries told WNYC at the time: “It’s got to be taken seriously because this is a serious allegation raised by a serious individual and needs to be investigated seriously. We’ve probably got to hear from him [Biden] at some point directly.”
“I’m not really in a position to say what is the appropriate mechanism, although this needs to be taken seriously,” he said then.
In a statement to Newsweek, Reade said that she “would be willing to go under oath and testify to what happened in 1993,” going on to describe herself as “politically homeless at this point and very concerned with the level of corruption.”