Remember Tara Reade? Biden sexual abuse accuser defects to Russia
Back in 2020, news was rife with a sexual misconduct allegation involving Joe Biden and a former employee named Tara Reade. Even then, the timing of the allegation was seen to be politically motivated given that Joe Biden was running for President later that year, and he appeared to have a much cleaner record of sexual allegations than his opponent, Donald Trump.
Fast-forward three years, and there is war at the gates of Europe as a result of the imperialistic determination of the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
In the midst of news—of the war in Ukraine on the one hand, and political tussling over debt ceilings and presidential campaigns on the other—the latest scoop concerning Tara Reade seemed to come out of the blue.
Or the Russian red—because Biden's accuser has defected to Russia.
Before we try to understand this piece of news, let us rewind two decades to allow for some context.
The tide started turning regarding Russian geopolitical strategy in the mid-2000s as "a reaction to US advancement in post-Soviet countries." When US President George Bush Jr.’s administration called for the promotion of democracy in former Soviet states and the wider world, this had ramifications for Putin and the Kremlin. Indeed, it could have been seen as an existential threat to Putin’s rule. As a result, in 2007, the Russian leader responded in a famous speech at the Munich Security Conference where he claimed that a unipolar world led by the USA was turning the planet into a dictatorship of one country, and that Russia had to stand against it and take the risk of challenging the global US hegemony.
Of course, now we have BRICS—a hegemonic alternative to the US trade a political supremacy comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. But this turning tide also saw a change in military strategy. Russia decided to start focusing on methods to gain international advantage away from military machines and uniformed manpower by spending money on disinformation, bot farms, and troll factories. Russian web brigades became the army of 5th generation warfare—fighting on the battlefields in the information space.
Fighting on the virtual landscape is much cheaper. And far, far more effective. Conventional warfare would never have been able to see Russia meddle so successfully in US and UK (Brexit) elections in the way that bots and trolls have.
Yevgeny Pigozhin, the infamous leader of the Wagner mercenary group operating in Ukraine, was also the creator of the most famous troll farm: the Internet Research Agency. He even admitted as much in February this year: “I react with pleasure. I’ve never just been the financier of the Internet Research Agency. I invented it, I created it, I managed it for a long time. It was founded to protect the Russian information space from boorish aggressive propaganda of anti-Russian narrative from the West.”
At the same time, he admitted to meddling in the US elections and political system, saying in November last year, “Gentlemen, we interfered, we interfere and we will interfere. Carefully, precisely, surgically and in our own way, as we know how. During our pinpoint operations, we will remove both kidneys and the liver at once.”
This kind of admission might at one point have been embarrassing for the Kremlin and Putin but they appear to be beyond caring what anyone else in the world thinks bar China, Syria (only because they hold the keys to a Mediterranean port for the Russians) and perhaps Iran.
Suffice it to say that Russia is involved in all sorts of disinformation activities around the world: ~it is doctrinally part of their strategy.
Let us now return to Tara Reade. Many at the time rebuffed Reade's accusations with claims that she was unreliable—she was "manipulative, deceitful, [a] user"—that her story was full of holes, and that she lied under oath. But there might have been far more, geopolitically speaking, going on with the claims of sexual misconduct.
Yesterday, Reade claimed she was defecting to Russia. She did this at a Russian state-run press conference, sitting next to her friend, a Russian spy named Maria Butina. That alone is enough to raise eyebrows.
Reade's admission to the partisan Russian press set out that her "very difficult" decision had been made because she fears for her safety in America. “I'm still kind of in a daze a bit but I feel very good,” she told Russian media organization Sputnik. “I feel very surrounded by protection and safety. And I just really so appreciate Maria [Butina] and everyone who's been giving me that at a time when it's been very difficult to know if I'm safe or not.”
Reade was nothing if not glowing in her endorsement of Russia. “You have US and European citizens looking for safe haven here. And luckily, the Kremlin is accommodating. So we're lucky.”
The former Senate staffer spoke for an hour, live-streamed on Twitter, touching many topics, including denigrating the "terrible" roads in the US. “To my Russian brothers and sisters, I’m sorry right now that American elites are choosing to have such an aggressive stance. Just know that most American citizens do want to be friends and hope that we can have unity again,” she stated before adding, “I am enjoying my time in Moscow, and I feel very at home.”
There are very strong suspicions that the 2020 accusation is part of the Russian project to sow discord in the American political system. As such, it is worth understanding that this defection is not the first hint of a Russian connection with Tara Reade.
In 2019, before the Biden sexual abuse allegation, she claimed in a tweet that Americans "support" Putin. She declared this on the back of her Medium article (now archived) entitled "Why a Liberal Democrat Supports Vladimir Putin" in which she said a whole range of thoroughly odd and Putin-fawning things:
I believe he has saved the world from a large conflict on more than one occasion. Maybe it is because he speaks reasonably, with emotional intelligence at diplomatic meetings. Maybe it is because I worked in the government and came to know the American international agenda. Stay with me, as it is even more than that.
...this experience opened my eyes to see America, as it is, not a democracy at all but a corporate autocracy. In other words, corporations run America...
President Putin brought a chaotic and failed nation to become a vibrant, creative, economic force within a decade...
...President Putin has tried again and again to keep diplomatic ties strong.... Politics has always been a blood sport.
President Putin’s genius is his judo ability to conserve his own energy and let the opponents flail...
...frankly, my dear, President Putin does not need America anymore, and neither does Russia.
Those are quite some claims...
She also tweeted about the new Russian "foreign agents" law, that requires foreign journalists to register as foreign agents or face fines:
Shortly before the outbreak of the war, Reade was interviewed on RT (Russia Today as it is now branded, the state mouthpiece for the Kremlin) where she claimed that she was "threatened" for her views on Russia. She has written a number of articles for the state media organization:
And then the podcast that she started, The Politics of Survival with Tara Reade, turned out to be a who's who of the Russian disinformation sphere, which she used "to promote Russian officials—and criticize the censorship of 'good news outlets like RT' in the US." She has repeated the same debunked claims of the Russian state: "Ukrainian Nazis," the "Kiev regime," and the Ukrainian "genocide in Donbas."
As if that is not enough, she was one of the speakers at the controversial "antiwar" Rage Against the War Machine rally:
She was also one of the speakers at the "antiwar" Rage Against the War Machine event, in which she blamed Biden's administration, among other things, for organizing a "money laundering scheme" in Ukraine.
13/22 pic.twitter.com/v5PjuFP5Ly— Pekka Kallioniemi (@P_Kallioniemi) May 31, 2023
She then received an award from the Center for Political Innovation that had all the hallmarks of the Soviet era...
Tara Reade getting an award from CPI 🤡🏆 pic.twitter.com/EIa8aDW6ND
— GrandTurion (@GrandTurion) May 30, 2023
In October, she talked of the loss of "Western hegemony" and its "failed states," while praising Putin and the new multipolar hegemony centered in the East. Reade claimed that "China and Russia are flourishing," but that a "cold Winter" would come for the West.
It didn't, in case you were wondering.
The Daily Beast reports on her activities at the end of 2022:
In December, Semafor reported that Russian diplomats tried to bring Reade to a meeting on “weapons diversion,” even though she had no known expertise on the topic. While Reade ultimately did not speak at the UN meeting, she did interview Russia’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations on her YouTube channel afterward.
“Your name was too toxic for them and they did everything they could to block you from participating,” Dimitry Polyanskiy told Reade in the interview.
Reade later told Semafor that the Russian UN diplomat reached out to her because of her online commentary on the war in Ukraine. She also called herself a “longtime anti-imperialist” and expressed her frustrations with “Russophobia.”
From being a Biden supporter, she has more recently shown her support for the pro-Kremlin MAGA crowd of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, appearing on the latter's more recent show in its online iteration as well as when he was at Fox News.
The question for some might be whether this move toward a pro-Russian narrative, Putin appeasement, and eventual defection was one that was a result of rejection from the political establishment in 2020 after the Biden accusation, or whether the wheels were set in motion beforehand. And given that there were elements of this sort of belief and activity witnessed before 2020, we can be reasonable in thinking her connections with Russia pre-existed the Biden accusation.
In other words, Reade has potentially been a very useful Russian asset. And she has now turned to the perceived comfort of the Kremlin's iron bosom. Given her recent claims and friendships, this may give her all the sustenance she wants.
