Tara Reade, the former Senate aide who in 2020 accused then-Presidential candidate Joe Biden of sexually assaulting her nearly three decades earlier, has fled the U.S. for Russia and asked President Vladimir Putin for citizenship.
Reade made her surprise announcement on Tuesday in a lengthy interview with the pro-Russian Sputnik media organization. She appeared on a broadcast alongside Maria Butina, a suspected Kremlin spy who spent 13 months in a U.S. federal prison before being deported back to Russia in 2019, and thanked Butina for her assistance.
Biden has denied the allegations made by Reade, who claimed Tuesday that her continuing efforts to speak out publicly about the president made her feel unsafe about living in the United States.
“I’m still kind of in a daze a bit but I feel very good,” Reade told Sputnik, saying she made the “very difficult” decision to leave the United States because of her security concerns. She stopped short of saying she was formally defecting and renouncing her U.S. citizenship.
“My dream is to live in both places, but it may be that I only live in this place and that’s okay,” Reade said.
During the joint appearance, Reade described Butina as “my friend,” and Masha, a fond Russian diminutive of Maria. “We’ve known each other for quite some time now,” Butina said in asking Putin himself to “fast track” Reade’s citizenship request.
“I feel very surrounded by protection and safety” in Russia, Reade said. “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.”
“I just didn’t want to walk home and walk into a cage or be killed, which is basically my two choices,” Reade said.
Reade didn’t specify why she felt threatened in the United States or provide details about how she ended up in Russia. But she hinted that the timing was related to her interest in talking publicly about her alleged relationship with Biden long ago, especially with the 2024 presidential election campaign heating up.
Puzzled by Reade’s circumstances
Several former U.S. intelligence officials told USA TODAY that they were puzzled by Reade’s actions and public statements − and highly suspicious of them.
Former CIA analyst Gail Helt watched the entire Russian media broadcast and said Reade’s sudden appearance in Moscow, and her association with Butina, has all the hallmarks of a Russian information operation – whether Reade knows it or not.
“She acknowledges and thanks Maria Butina, calls her a friend and suggests that they’ve been friends for years. So, if you have known her for years, was she influencing you in 2019 when you accused Joe Biden? I mean, there’s a lot that was really fishy about that” TV appearance, Helt told USA TODAY.
A possible link to Putin?
Asked about Reade’s case, White House spokesman John Kirby said he didn’t want to speculate on why a U.S. citizen had decided to move to Russia, request citizenship directly from Vladimir Putin and denounce the United States.
“That’s really for her speak to,” Kirby said at the White House briefing Wednesday afternoon. “The one thing I will say is that allegations that her life was at risk by the United States government (are) absolutely false, baseless, there’s nothing to that.”
Asked if the White House believed Reade may have been influenced by the Russian government, Kirby said, “Again, I would let this prospective Russian citizen speak for her intentions and motivations.”
But, Kirby added, “It’s a matter of record that Mr. Putin and the Russian government have tried to interfere, actually did interfere, in our elections going back as far as 2016.”
“It should come as no surprise to anybody that Mr. Putin would show an interest in making it hard for President Biden to win election and to try to interfere in his ability to govern as president of the United States,” Kirby said. “But whether this particular move by this particular individual is some sort of Russian information op or propaganda campaign, I just don’t know.”
Kirby said he had not seen any information that would link Reade to Russian information operations.
A Biden accuser in 2019, and again in 2020
Reade first came forward with her allegations against Biden in 2019 when she was one of several women who accused him of kissing, hugging or touching them in ways that made them feel uncomfortable. Then, in a March 2020 podcast, Reade accused Biden ‒ then the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee ‒ of inappropriately touching her in a Capitol Hill building 27 years earlier, when she worked in Biden’s Delaware Senate office in 1993.
Biden has repeatedly and vehemently denied Reade’s allegations, and so have some key staffers who worked with both of them in at the time.
Last December, Reade called on House Republicans to use their new majority to investigate Biden, and to call her as a witness to testify against him. “I think we need to have the conversation, instead of me being erased, and other women that were erased that tried to come forward,” she told the conservative news outlet The Daily Caller.
Also in December, Russian officials moved to invite Reade to appear before the United Nations Security Council, purportedly as an expert witness on weapons trafficking, according to the U.S. media outlet Semafor,
Reade appeared to reference those efforts in her Russian media appearance, saying that, “based on what was happening and sort of the push for them to not want me to testify, I felt that while this election is gearing up and there’s so much at stake, I’m almost better off here and just being safe.”
Ties to a Russian state agent
Butina was a young American University graduate student who charmed Republican and NRA high rollers before the FBI arrested her in Washington in 2018 on suspicion of acting as a Russian intelligence asset. Since returning to Russia, she has become a media star and celebrity of sorts, and now serves in the Russian parliament as a representative of Putin’s political party.
During their joint media appearance Tuesday, Reade praised Russia and Putin specifically, and criticized America – especially the “few Washington elites who are determined to cause problems” between the two superpowers.
Reade also criticized the NATO alliance, and said she wasn’t the only American who has forsaken the U.S. for Russia.
“There are many Americans here, and I don’t want to out a bunch of Americans, but there are people here that are coming to Russia – much like back in the day when Soviet Union people defected over to the US – now you have the opposite,” she said. “Now you have US and European citizens looking for safe haven here. And luckily, the Kremlin is accommodating. So we’re lucky.”
The Sputnik news story said Reade’s message to other Americans is that they should take action to protect themselves and their families “and to really look at who you’re voting for.”
A Russian sympathizer, but maybe something else?
Javed Ali, a former senior U.S. law enforcement and intelligence official, said that given Reade’s self-described relationship with Butina, it’s possible that Russia helped facilitate her move to Russia as part of an anti-U.S. propaganda campaign.
“Reade’s recent defection to Russia, combined with her past activities and unusual behavior seems to fit more the pattern of a pro-Russian American sympathizer (than) a trained asset of the Russian intelligence services or an actual intelligence officer themselves,” said Ali, a senior National Security Council official in the Trump administration, who also spent 16 years in top national security positions at the Defense Intelligence Agency, Department of Homeland Security and FBI.
Given her Biden-bashing, “At some point Russian intelligence personnel may have tried to recruit Reade and carry out taskings on their behalf,” Ali said. But if so, “those efforts seem to have been fallen far short of their original objectives. “
On the broadcast, Reade is highly critical of the United States and very complimentary of Russia, and Butina and Putin himself.
“She’s out there downplaying and dissing the United States, saying that our inflation is at 40%, which of course it is not, that gas prices have never been higher, that child poverty has never been higher, homelessness has never been higher,” said Helt, who left the CIA in 2014 after a dozen years traveling the world, and writing for and briefing the senior-most U.S. policymakers. “I mean, you want to talk about a Russian information operation, that is one. I was just horrified. It offended me viscerally.”
Helt said that one of Russia’s specialties is persuading unwitting Americans to do their bidding, including undermining the United States through the criticism of one of its own citizens. “To me, if I’m an intelligence officer watching that, I think she could absolutely be a Russian asset. She could be witting or unwitting. But when she shows up in Moscow, I think she’s witting at that point.”
