SENATOR: BIDEN TOLD ME ANITA HILL 'WAS LYING'
Accuser of Clarence Thomas had major contradictions in testimony
Joe Biden (Wikimedia Commons)
With the #MeToo movement on his mind, Joe Biden tried to make amends with Democratic voters ahead of the launch of his 2020 presidential campaign last week, apologizing to Anita Hill for not doing more to help her when she testified against Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court nomination in 1991.
Biden said on “The View” last Friday that he believed Hill’s claims of sexual harassment. But the late Sen. Arlen Specter wrote in his memoir that Biden told him he thought Hill was lying, reported Mollie Hemingway, a senior editor at the Federalist.
In 1998, Biden, who was the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, admitted to Specter, “It was clear to me from the way she was answering the questions, [Hill] was lying” about a key part of her testimony, according to Specter’s 2000 memoir, “Passion for Truth: From Finding JFK’s Single Bullet to Questioning Anita Hill to Impeaching Clinton.”
Biden told a different story on “The View.”
“Not only didn’t I vote for Clarence Thomas, I believed her from the beginning,” he told co-host Joy Behar. “I was against Clarence Thomas, I did everything in my power to defeat Clarence Thomas and he won by the smallest margin anyone ever won going on the Supreme Court.”
Hemingway wrote that the issue “is important, as the media and other partisans rewrite the historical record about Hill and her accusations.”
“The widely watched hearings revealed inaccuracies in Hill’s various versions of events and ended with 58 percent of Americans believing Thomas and only 24 percent believing Hill,” she wrote. “There was no gap between the sexes in the results.”
Since then, however, “activists have relentlessly attempted to change the narrative, writing fan fiction about Hill, bestowing honors on her, and asserting that her disputed allegations were credible.”
Concessions and major contradictions
Hemingway recalled that during the 1991 hearings, Specter noted many people had reported Hill had praised Thomas and his nomination to the Supreme Court. Among them was a former colleague at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where both Hill and Thomas had worked. Another person corroborated the claim.
“Hill disputed their claims,” Hemingway wrote. “She also disputed the former dean of her law school, who said she had praised Thomas as a ‘fine man and an excellent legal scholar.’ Then she claimed she didn’t know a woman named Phyllis Barry, who had told The New York Times that Hill’s allegations ‘were the result of Ms. Hill’s disappointment and frustration that Mr. Thomas did not show any sexual interest in her.'”
Specter, citing statements from two colleagues attesting that she knew Barry, forced Hill to concede that she knew her and had worked with her at the EEOC.
Specter also pressed Hill about major contradictions between her testimony to the Senate and her interviews with the FBI.
And significantly, Specter forced Hill to admit, after repeatedly insisting she couldn’t remember, that Senate staffers told her that her signed affidavit alleging sexual harassment by Thomas would be “the instrument that ‘quietly and behind the scenes’ would force him to withdraw his name.”
For his book, Specter asked Biden about the exchange.
“It was clear to me from the way she was answering the questions, she was lying,” Biden said.
“At that point I truncated the hearing and recessed it early for lunch,” Biden said. “I turned to my chief of staff and said, ‘Go down and tell her lawyers that if her recollection is not refreshed by the time she gets back, I will be compelled to pursue the same line of questioning the Senator [Specter] did. Because it seems to me, she did what he said.”
And Specter believed Biden’s warning to Hill helped her with with her eroding credibility
“Hill’s afternoon modification of her morning testimony, therefore, was not only deliberate but calculated to avoid greater erosion to her credibility,” the senator wrote.
‘Understating wildly’
On “The View,” Hemingway noted, Biden was reminded that people were upset he hadn’t allowed other women to testify against Thomas.
Biden said he tried to get them to testify, but forcing them to testify may have been worse for Hill.
“He was understating wildly,” Hemingway wrote, referring to the last woman mentioned in this summary of problems with Hills alleged witnesses:
Hill’s four alleged corroborating witnesses provided very weak testimony. One witness told Committee staff that the alleged harassment happened before Hill ever worked for Thomas. Another witness claimed that Hill had no political motives to oppose Thomas because she was a conservative who fully supported the Reagan Administration’s civil rights policies. This representation was false. Angela Wright, who many claimed would provide similar testimony as Hill, declined to testify because of serious credibility issues related to her motives and her previous efforts to falsely accuse a supervisor of racism.
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