The former Senate aide that accused Joe Biden of sexual assault has just received Russian citizenship.
Tara Reade blew up national headlines in 2019 when she condemned the culture of Biden’s Senate office, and further accused Biden of inappropriately touching her while she worked on his staff in 1993. Numerous major U.S. media outlets reported Reade’s story, but backtracked once discrepancies and inconsistencies in her narrative began to appear.
After Biden was nominated as the official Democratic candidate in the 2020 election, Reade’s story shifted into one of sexual assault. She accused Biden of pushing her against a wall, putting his hands under her clothes, and penetrating her with his fingers. Biden vehemently denied the allegations, and former Senate office staff members did not recall or corroborate Reade’s account.
Some of Reade’s other accusations also lacked credibility: Reade claimed she was fired for retaliation, but a PBS investigation that interviewed more than 70 former Biden staffers found that wasn’t the case. Instead, her colleagues recalled that she was fired for poor performance.
Some of Reade’s fiercest critics speculated that she was a Russian asset, in part fueled by since-deleted Medium posts and tweets in which she publicly praised Russian President Vladimir Putin. Five years on, that theory has earned a bit more credibility.
“This was a very special day,” Reade posted on X Monday, resharing a clip of her on RT, a Russian state-controlled television station. “I am now a Russian citizen! What an honor. Thank you to President Putin for this amazing honor of signing a decree making me a citizen and keeping me safe when I applied for asylum.”
Reade also gave a pointed shout-out to Maria Butina, a Russian parliamentarian and self-admitted Kremlin agent who was convicted in 2018 for conspiring to act as a clandestine foreign agent on behalf of Russia in the 2016 U.S. election. Butina leveraged her ties at the NRA, including her boyfriend—longtime Republican fundraiser Paul Erickson—to develop backchannels between Moscow and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Butina first attempted to get face time with Trump as early as July 2015.
Reade first announced her intention to defect to Russia in 2023, when she claimed she no longer felt safe in America. Around the same time, Moscow had announced its intention to build a migrant village for American conservatives to take refuge from “liberal gender norms.” However, the project has since collapsed due to low demand, Russian outlet Vot Tak reported in July.
“I am a lucky girl,” Reade concluded.
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