Take a look behind the curtain with a real whistle blower, an
American patriot prepared to embrace the uncomfortable truth
because this program has no time for comforting lies.
Here is civil liberties enthusiasts, Second Amendment
defender and recovering FBI agent Kyle Seraphin.
Hello my friends, welcome to the Kyle Seraphin show.
Today is Thursday, August the 17th and we have a very special
treat for you today. We have an interview from an
American in Moscow, something that you may not expect to hear
and certainly something that I thought was worth our time once.
Once Tara and I had a conversation the day before.
So ladies and gentlemen, stick around for that.
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It's going to be continuing to add.
There's going to be some new additions in the next week.
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Social. Gerardo Boyle has come through
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And you'll find suspendables merch.
There's T-shirts there looks like there's going to be some
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gentlemen, if you want to put something on your lapel and let
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We're going to have some very unique and limited edition stuff
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The DASH suspendables.com. OK, without any further ado, I
want to say folks tuck in for this one.
It's a long conversation. I think you're going to get
information you probably haven't heard anywhere else, at least in
this format. I haven't.
And I've spoken to to Tara long form.
So without further ado, Tara Reid from Moscow.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, I'm very excited about this
interview. We are speaking to Tara Reid.
She is in Moscow. That is not America.
She's speaking to us here, live in Liberty Hill, TX.
And we are going to get to the bottom of what has been called a
defection, which I think is probably the wrong word.
We made this connection again. So Tara and I have talked a
number of times over the last few months.
She reached out to me yesterday and I knew that the story was
something you all should hear as well.
So we're going to get to the bottom of what's going on with
her situation, and I'm going to debunk any of the myths that
have been put out there in the mainstream media, and there are
many of them. We're going to get the whole
story here. So, folks, I think you're going
to really want to tune in, clear your schedules.
I don't know how long this will take, but let's get going.
And Taro, thanks for joining me at such a late hour.
What time is it right now? Oh, it's like, you know, 10:45
or so at night. It is late, so I appreciate you
staying up late. People stay up late in Russia's,
not even Europe. What do we call that?
Eurasia. No, I, I mean, it's, it's the
East, I guess, but Russia, Russia is, you're right, though
it does get light early, like at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, it
starts getting light. So, yeah.
And in Saint Petersburg, it stays light.
They have white nights and it stays.
I was there for white nights. It's quite beautiful.
It's light almost until 2/3 in the morning.
It's quite lovely. That's.
Kind of like what goes on in Anchorage I guess.
Is it that far up? Yes.
I, I never think of it as that far up, but I guess that makes
sense. All right, before we get too far
afield, because I will just get sideways and we'll just start
chatting. Let's tell people who you are
and why they know your name and what sort of the, the prequel of
the story is. And then we're going to get into
the nitty gritty of it. As long as you'd like to tell
it. But start with maybe where you
grew up. I, I read a quick bio on you,
some things I didn't know, like you'd lived in Wisconsin.
Maybe tell us the story. I've grown up.
Yeah, yeah. I, I was, I was born in
Monterey, CA, Monterey County, California.
And my parents moved when I was a baby to Wisconsin and had a
farm. My father owned a business.
And so he was a, what you call a gentleman farmer, if you will.
And my mom had like an acre organic garden and we had 80
acres and lots of animals. And it was very nice upbringing.
I don't think I even had fast food until I was 15 years old
because we were really living off the land.
We had beef cattle. Our neighbor had dairy cattle,
so it was quite a wholesome upbringing.
And I had a couple of brothers. My, my, you know, my family had
its ups and downs and my parents divorced when I was 13 and my
father was a defense contractor. I became a defense contractor.
He also was the president of PR for Honeywell.
And so he was pretty establishment.
My mother on the other hand was an artist and she was not
establishment at all and she was an activist and anti war and
marched and then also helped boys go to Canada to avoid the
Vietnam draft. Although my brother served
Michael, he was a conscientious objector but he did go overseas
during the Vietnam War. He was quite a bit older than me
and my brother Michael unfortunately died when I was
young and he and I were very close.
So it was, it was a really hard time for me when he when he
died. But my mother was quite, you
know, she was quite the activist and, you know, very outspoken
and, you know, and, and, and a guiding force.
And so I kind of had political cognitive dissonance, if you
will. I had a great grandmother that
was a communist and I had Republicans and I had but mostly
Democrats in my family. And I went on very interested in
politics as well as acting. I was in acting and classically
trained when I was young and my first professional work was when
I was 16. It was as as a writer and an
actress. I wrote some poetry that was
published and that was my first paycheck ever.
And then after that, I did modeling and acting
professionally, moved out of the house.
And then, you know, I was really needing to feed the intellect
and was really into political science and geopolitics.
It was just always a fascination.
And I was a like a debate person in high school and went to state
with debate. I mean, I was really into it.
So I had this opportunity in college.
I was approached by one of my professors and they said, hey,
there's an internship with Leon Panetta's office and I think
that you might fit the bill for it if you want to try to apply.
And so I did and I was hired and, and I went and worked for
him. And then I after the internship,
I was trained in campaigns and worked as a Democratic
operative. And then I went on and worked
for Joe Biden. And before we jump into that,
will you give people context of Leon Panetta, what he was doing?
I think a lot of people know the name and don't know who he is.
And then maybe what you mean by the word political operative,
which I hear a lot, but I don't have a great idea of what it
means. OK, well, you have different
roles in campaigns. I was a field manager and I was
more in strategy of, you know, how to win that congressional
campaign. So I was I was working on that
and overseeing volunteers, hundreds of volunteers and also
strategy of how to win it. And you know, we're trained by
different organizations, think tanks, they come in and they do
trainings and teach you how to do that.
I really enjoyed doing that work.
There are other people that do camping opposition research.
That's a little more, that's the that's the hit things that you
see. I'm not really, I wasn't really
even back then, I didn't like that kind of thing.
But there are other people that that's there, you know,
wheelhouse. But overall it's like, it's
almost like a, they even call it a war room.
When you're running a campaign, It's it's very much like war.
You're dealing with strategy and you're trying to win and and you
do what it takes to do that. As far as Congressman Panetta,
he was, well, I just said it, he was a congressman representing,
he's from Carmel Valley, CA. I was born in Monterey, as you
know. So it's in that same district
and back then it was district there and he represented that
area before he went into the CIA.
He was a also a former White House chief of staff for Bill
Clinton, but left and I believe he left and discussed.
So my time at Leon Panetta's was unremarkable.
I mean, I learned a lot. But he was really, you know, a
very the kind of person that seemed very serious about his
work. He would stay up late reading
the bills. There was no nonsense in his
office, not like Joe Biden. And he was he was an interesting
person. I disagree with a lot of his
positions, particularly on war. And, you know, as it stands
right now, he's on the board of Raytheon, which is a missile
company. So.
And so when you see him comment about Ukraine and be really, you
know, forceful about that, just remember he's lining his pockets
so. And he was the Secretary of
Defense and as well as the CIA, so, so obviously very entrenched
in the the military industrial type world, right?
Absolutely yes. I want to, I want to dig into a
little bit of this. You gave us kind of a, a taste
of your dad was a military defense contractor.
You said, did I get that right? And mom is an activist.
Who do you think you took after? Or did you take a little bit of
both? I took after my mother, I guess,
as far as because I did work for traditional Democrats and in
that I wanted to work in the Senate.
I wanted to run for office eventually.
Then I guess I, you know, there's a little bit of my dad
there too. So, yeah, little, you know,
working within the system to make change.
I didn't like marching. I wasn't the type that like to
hold signs or March. That wasn't my thing.
Instead of that, you like to work in the office end and
actually execute strategy it sounds like.
Yes. Yeah, I want.
To work behind the scenes to do all that.
So you've gone from intern, we've gone into a operative
working on campaign work. And then what was the the door
that opened that allowed you to go to work for Joe Biden?
I was actually hired at the interview, which is, you know, I
thought that was normal, but apparently that's not.
But I did a phone call interview with the scheduler and then was
and and then someone else jumped on the line.
I think the one of my other supervisors who became my
supervisor and I can't really recall.
But then I flew out for the final interview and I was
sitting and being interviewed and Joe Biden breezed in with a
couple of the his staff and her office was like right next to
his and kind of out in the open. So he had to walk past her to
get to his door. And he just looked at me and on
our conversation and he interrupted and introduced
himself and, and she basically, Marianne basically said, who is
the scheduler? She said, Oh, this is Tara Reid.
And, and he said, oh, an Irish name Tara, you know, and then
he's, she said he, she worked for, she worked for Leon Panetta
as an intern. He said, oh, Leon, he's a great
guy. He's a good man, good man.
And then he looked at me and he just looked at me and looked
back at her and said, you should hire her.
You know she's hired so and then.
That was that. Yeah, he left.
He like moved away. And then she looked at me and
said OK, so you're hired. And I'm like, OK.
And that that's not common, you're saying, huh, that's not
common apparently. Apparently not.
I thought it was like I, you know, I left and, you know,
being in my 20s, I thought, oh, OK, cool.
You get hired at the interview. That never happened to me in my
life. So yeah, that was that was
interesting. We have a picture, I think, of
your ID badge from that era. This is when you're working for
Leon Panetta. Does that sound right, Ryan?
We pull up the the picture of the ID badge just for kind of
fun. It's just kind of vintage setup
if you can. Yeah, Give me one second.
I got to track it down. I'll get it.
OK, no problem. And then there's also we have a,
a photo from probably about that air, I'm thinking where you have
the long hair in the red dress on.
So we're going to throw a couple of photos up from that kind of
time frame. And so you, you get hired right
at the interview. There's there's that photo.
Look at that. So there, that was your
congressional ID as an intern, I think.
Does that sound right? And.
You have the curly hair there, and so you get hired right off
the spot. You don't know any better.
Did you go back and talk to your colleagues in that space and
hear about different hiring stories?
I know the FBI, we always compared notes.
Well, you know, it's interesting because I left, right and a
friend was waiting for me and they expected to just like,
because I traveled there to just, we would go out to dinner
and just like see the sights or whatever.
And I was like, well, I got the job.
And he was like, he was amazed. He was like, what, you know, you
got it at the, And I said, yeah. And then he he said, well, let's
go celebrate. Let's go to New York.
So we went to New York City and we celebrated, took the train up
and had fun and met other friends and and celebrated.
And then I went back to California and packed up my
world and moved to DC. And thus began the great
adventure in many ways. What did you see?
If you can think back to that time, what did you think you
were embarking on as far as a life?
Because I'm sure it went differently.
Oh, I thought it was the beginning of my career.
I was very enthusiastic at that point.
You know, Joe Biden was very powerful in the Senate.
He was the chairman of judiciary, chairman of the
Foreign Relations. I was really fascinated with the
Foreign Relations Committee, with anything to do with
geopolitics. And I wanted to eventually run
for Senate if I could, or Congress.
So I looked at him. As you know, he's about my
father's age at that time as a mentor, frankly.
And, you know, so I was very kind of starstruck that I got to
work in the Senate. I was so proud to serve my
country. I was so proud to to be in
public service. It's what I always wanted to do.
And so, yeah, I felt like I was in the right place, you know,
that feeling like, oh, this is it.
This is the right place to be. And.
What about the people you worked with?
What was the climate in the office?
The other staffers. That was interesting because
right away I got the vibe that there was a lot of unhappiness
and it was very top down. And the chief of staff is Ted
Kaufman. And Ted Kaufman, now I know more
about his background. He's from DuPont Corporation and
was very high up in that. And he runs it like kind of that
like a very kind of a corporate kind of feel.
Also Biden has you're given each office is given the same amount
of money, but they allocate it the way they wish.
The chief of staff is responsible for that.
And Biden's office was 49th out of 50 in pay.
So we're yeah, for all the staffers because my pay was very
low. It was very hard to live on the
wage that they gave us because they kept a top heavy.
So like the Ted Kaufman got a lot of money and Dennis Toner
and some of the other upper level.
But you know, you know, other staffers and legislative aides,
we were paid very little. So it was interesting.
But you always, you hear people, sometimes they say you get paid
in salary and sometimes you get paid with the title.
It sounds like they were open, you were getting by with the
title and you were excited about your right.
And you had you had a lot of privilege there.
You had a lot of people that were trust funders.
I think this was sort of the beginning of that era that you
have back East where where the media and where the politics are
run by these, you know, barons of industries, children, right?
Like they're, they're privileged.
They've gone to all the right schools.
Like, you know, they would have conversations about the
different Ivy League schools they went to.
I went to Community College and you know, I am and my mother was
highly educated, but self educated.
My father did go to Colgate, but you know, that's neither here
nor there. He, he, I don't consider that
really an Ivy League school and he had to actually go back and
get to his master's. So, you know, I think it's
interesting that there was a lot of snobbery around that on the
Hill even back then, like who went to Brown and who went to
Harvard and such. So that I think that era
started, it was really starting in.
And now you see that with the media, where you see media
people where they're coming from these Ivy League schools and
they have no idea how to do real journalism.
They're just, you know, they've had a very different life.
You're touching on something that has been very dear to my
heart. My people like Matt Taibbi and
and even my father, who was in media for a long time, always
talked about journalism being a blue collar profession where
people would go and try to hold the powerful to account.
And now it seems like they they just want to pad their
friendships that they have with them.
How did you fit into that culture?
Did you did you get along with your colleagues?
Well, I got, I got along OK. I just didn't try to fit in.
And remember, too, I kind of had the attitude because I'm, you
know, at this point, I'm 28 years old, 27 years old and I, I
already had the, you know, you know, I've been on movie sets
and film sets and different work environments and then worked in
campaigns. I didn't necessarily socialize
with the people I worked with. Now they did, they all
socialized with each other, but I kept a little bit of a
distance. And I think there wasn't even a
hit article written about that. But I wasn't an outlier, an
outsider. I simply didn't think it was a
good idea to go. And I wasn't a drinker.
I don't really drink alcohol. I don't do drugs.
And a lot of the people in that culture at that time were doing
cocaine, They were doing drugs, they were doing drinking and
they were partying. And they would even do it at the
House and the Senate and especially on long nights when
there was bills and stuff, you'd see a lot of drinking and stuff.
And I I just wasn't part of that culture it.
Makes a lot of sense. Once in a while I did once in a
while, you know, I did my Wilds whatever, went to the Irish pub
and you know, whatever. But I wasn't like an Angel.
But I just mean it wasn't a regular practice.
It wasn't something that I sought out to do.
It wasn't like, oh, this Friday night, this is all I want to do.
I also had built because of Congressman Leon Peretta.
I had built a friendships with some girls that we, we lived in
this place called the Nunnery. They called it, they nicknamed
it Thompson, Mark Markwood Hall, Markson Hall.
And we it was girls only and boys were not allowed up after
9:00. Of course, women snuck their
boyfriends up because we were in their 20s, you know, whatever.
But we were in college and, and so I made some really good
friends. In fact, I'm still friends with
some of them today. Well, now it's a little more
difficult, but but you know, carried on for decades, our
friendship, you know, because you're living in that dorm and
then you're all walking across the street to the sun at the
house. And it was supposed to be the
safe place like in DC because DC was seen as so dangerous during
that time. It was considered a very
dangerous city. There was even like a headline
article about that at that time. And what's ironic about that is
the actual predators were in Congress.
Let's Yeah, let's talk about that.
First of all, give me give me the the feeling of living in DC
at the time, having worked in there.
I have a sense of what it looked like obviously in the last 10
years or so. But I'm curious how was it at
that point? What, what was the street level
crime looking like? What was the experience of
moving around in Northwest near where all the the seats of power
are? There was a lot of homeless
during that time, homeless families, homeless children.
In fact, I was a volunteer for Hill Staffers for the Hungry and
the Homeless. And it was really kind of, you
know, didn't that organization didn't do much when we tried.
But like, it was, it was really, really dire poverty right around
the hill. Like, I mean, you're talking
people living in shocks with no electricity, no running water
and children with bare feet. Real poverty.
I saw a lot of real bad poverty when I was there.
And I noticed that maybe some of my friends didn't.
They were more into the, you know, social scene.
But I was noticing it when I would go into a restaurant, I
would see right outside there was homeless.
And this is before other cities, you know, started really seeing
a lot of homeless. And I think Washington, DC was
one of the first places that you really saw greater numbers.
And so you already saw the economic divide happening in DC
and then you saw, of course, you know, the people that are in
their bubbles, they don't even notice the poverty around them,
the very wealthy and the diplomats and whatnot that live
in their bubbles, right? And, you know, as far as you
know, the atmosphere for women, it was changing, but it was
still, we were very objectified, or at least I was to extend.
And there was a lot of, there is a lot of bad behavior, if you
will, on the hill and and you know, some women participated in
that themselves and some didn't want to.
And so the ones that didn't want to didn't last long, right?
I would say that there was a lot of that kind of behavior and,
you know, objectification. Can you get specific about what
we're talking about bad behavior?
I don't have to have names per SE, but I'm curious of examples
of what we're talking about. You know, whether it's liaisons
or parties, whatever. But like, so people get an idea
because you're giving people a look behind something that they
don't ever get to experience. They suspect it, I think.
But you. Know when I was at Thompson
Markwood Hall, you know at one point I brought my car out from
California. Being a Californian, we I took
the metro, but we love our cars. You know how we are.
So I was like often the designated driver because I
didn't really drink and I or like if we went far out, I was
like the person that would drive or pick up someone that was in a
bad situation. And I got a call, you know, and
we had beepers back then. By the way, this is like how old
I I was. Just thinking this is everyone's
thinking of Ubers, but there's no Ubers, There's taxi cab only.
There's the metro, Yeah, no, cell phones weren't as common
with that. So.
So then I went out and the young there was a young girl who was
in the hallway who was in the. Excuse me, the, the place, the
hall with me. You know that that residence.
And she called hysterical, crying drunk, whatever.
And when I, when I got ahold of her and she was at a payphone
and in the middle of nowhere and it was like really late at
night, I woke up my other friend from the other room and said,
you know, you're coming with me and we're going to go get her.
And I don't want to say her name, but she had had a
consensual affair with a very prominent Republican senator.
And I won't say his name right now.
It's in my book. And I lead to it Someday I'll
I'll reveal who it was, but very prominent, you'd know the name.
And he had had an affair with her and she was totally
enthralled and thought he was going to leave his wife and be
with her. And she's like 22.
She was younger than me and and she was.
Anyway, she was crying, drunk, her stockings were all torn.
He apparently she'd made a scene and he dumped her off just in
the middle of somewhere in Virginia, just like on the side
of the road and dumped her. And so I took her, you know, we
took her. And I was like, the whole time I
was sort of sympathetic. But then also I was hoping she
wouldn't bar from the car. You know, I was having those
thoughts that we do when we're getting our friends out of
messes. And the next day, you know, she
was really, really heartbroken. I didn't really even realize.
I just thought she was drunk until later, how heartbroken she
was. And I was walking down the hall,
and this young staffer walked up to me, and he said, good job.
Thanks for that. And I'm like, what?
And he goes cleaning up that mess.
And then he walked away. And I was like, oh, my God, I'm
part of the problem. Yeah, I'm part of the problem.
Yeah. So she ended up going back to
her home state and not returning.
And she was a very young intern who fell in love with, you know,
her boss, I guess, and had sexual relations.
And he dumped her on the side of the road, so.
Can you talk about, So this is totally foreign to me.
So I'm, I'm both curious, but also a little bit, a little bit
horrified by it. There is a culture of women that
are very attracted to, to particularly unattractive men
who have power that are much older than them.
Can you talk about it especially 'cause it sounds like you were
kind of a dispassionate observer and I'd love to hear your
response. And just seeing some of your
younger colleagues, young, pretty idealistic.
Yeah, I mean, there were many like that, that thought, I mean,
you 2 you have to remember at the time period in the 90s,
there's still this thought or traditional theory that women
were to get married and have babies and.
And that powerful men were the way you go.
It's almost like biological, right?
They go for the biggest wingspan and the birds.
And in this case, we're going for the for the most power.
I look at it dispassionately, probably because I was estranged
for my father for most of my life.
So I didn't have what you would call daddy issues.
I didn't have I I didn't idolize a daddy and I didn't think I
needed one, if you know what I mean saying.
So I just, I just wanted a partner.
I wanted like I wanted a guy who was equal to me and could handle
me, but I didn't want necessarily affect all the men I
dated were my age or even a little younger.
So I didn't want an older dude. That's just me.
I just didn't find them attractive And but some of my
friends did and they just did. They they found that alluring.
Maybe the way they dressed, maybe the way whatever it was
that attracted them. I it's always been a mystery to
me, but but they did. There were several that were
just what you're saying. They were actually doing a job,
kind of hunting for a husband or a powerful lover that could take
them to the next level rather than just relying on their own
skills, which which is kind of sad.
Well, I'm, I'm reflecting on this, this sort of cultural
phenomenon. And Pretty Woman was released in
1990, the famous Julia Roberts movie with Richard Gere.
And and in a lot of ways, I see a lot of the parallels there.
You know, he's rich, he's powerful.
He's he's kind of dashing. He's got Gray hair even at a
younger age, you know, and and she's yelling.
Yeah. And and there is that phenomenon
that was kind of an archetype or a mythology that existed in the
90s maybe, you know, and that is kind of a throwback thing.
I mean, it's almost vintage 50s kind of thing where women were
looking for that, that kind of hero, But it wasn't a knight in
shining armor. Think about what was it Bonnie
Tyler that did I need a hero, Right?
It was the same kind of time. And so that's what we're
describing. And, and I just want people to
get out of that mindset because it is so different than 20 plus
years, 30 years from now. And I mean, like, they would
make jokes in front of us about sex or whatever, or like they
would tell us, you know, to go get the beer, go get the wine,
bring it to the, you know, I remember carrying cases of beer
up to Panetta's office for the other staffers.
He wasn't doing that, but it was his, you know, staff and me.
And they'd make jokes about, they'd go through like the
resumes and, and like try to, you know, and, and joke about
what the women looked at. I mean, it's just, you know,
and, and some of it I didn't, you know, I grew up with
brothers. So I grew up with three brothers
and I didn't have a sister to, to, you know, so I know how men
behave. And I didn't think too much of
that. Like I wasn't, I'm not, I don't
like the word feminist, but I wasn't like a hardcore feminist.
But I did want to be appreciated for my intellectual abilities
and my skills and my analytical skills.
And that definitely wasn't happening when I was 2728 years
old. So no.
All right, you, you mentioned earlier predators weren't on the
streets, they were in the halls of Congress.
Let's let's go there and kind of dig into that a little bit.
We talked about the culture. Now, you had a very unique
experience with that. And I know some people have
asked questions about it. You and I have talked about it.
Let's let's lay it out for people what the allegation was,
what the you know, so they can make up their own mind about
your story. Sure.
Yeah, You know, I, well, it started off like this.
You know, I didn't have any kind of rapport or relationship with
Joe Biden. I met him, you know, I was a low
level staffer, so I had, you know, a little bit of contact
with him, but not a lot. He was there daily on and off.
And sometimes he'd be traveling there would be like a whole
week. I wouldn't see him, whatever.
And there'd be other times where I'd see him twice or three times
in a day. You know, it just depended.
I wouldn't necessarily interact with him.
It wasn't like a a flirtation or relationship like you heard
about like with Monica Lewinsky or some of those things.
Nothing like that at all. And so I thought of him, this
office, not so much him per SE, but the office as like a
mentoring place where then I would make, you know, my next
move, Like I would work here for a while and then move up.
And that quickly changed the reality of that.
He started making like when I would see him at a meeting, he
would put his hands on me, put him his hands on my shoulder.
And then he would rub my neck underneath my hair with his
thumb. And he would just put, you know,
he just didn't have any kind of sense of space for people.
And it was really unusual. No boundaries.
Yeah. And I and, and we didn't really
use the vernacular back then like that.
It was just, it was odd. I just remember being like, God,
OK, Panetta never did anything like that.
Like, I can't even imagine him doing anything like that.
So. So I and I only have that to
compare to, Right. So then he kept doing things
like that and at different times.
And then there was an incident where I walked in to where
Marianne was sitting and there was an argument between
Genevieve Cullen, one of the staffers, and her and another
staffer, Tracy, who is the assistant to Marianne.
And they were all arguing about the fact that Joe Biden wanted
to have me serve drinks because he liked my legs and he thought
I was pretty. And so who's having this
argument? These are two women discussing
what Joe Biden had said to them. Right.
And so Genevieve was sticking up for me, and she turned to me and
she was like, in the heat of it. And she goes, Tara, you don't
have to do that. That's not your job.
And I'm like, OK. And I, it was like one of those
moments where and then everyone kind of looked at me.
I was like, there's nothing I can say that's going to be
right. Anything I say is going to be
wrong in this in this moment. And I just kind of froze.
And Marianne said, you know, she gave me a look like she had this
way of giving you a look like when she was trying to get you
to do what you're supposed to do.
She was my supervisor. And so I just stayed quiet.
And then, you know, Genevieve talked to me by myself.
And then and then Marianne took me in the hallway and she said,
you know, you've got to just keep your head down and, you
know, you go along to get along. You know, that kind of the kind
of pep talk, right? Like this is, you know, you
should take this as a compliment.
You know, like he, he noticed you and you should, you know,
whatever. And then you're 20.
Eight years old. I'm sorry.
You're about 28 at the time. Is that?
Yes, 27? This picture that we're flashing
up on the screen you sent over, what, what, what age was that
you think? That was the same age I was.
It was like, in fact, it was taken a month before I went to
Biden's office. OK, so just so people, this is
this is the hair, this is what the the look is that you've got.
This is the this is the air. I'm looking at the clothes.
Even the clothes is kind of reminding me of the 90s too.
And, and so and how old is this this woman who's your boss
that's telling you what is she? She's. 50s.
OK, so she's kind of matronly and she's giving you this is how
it works. This is what you do.
Then I went home, of course, talked to my mom, and my mom was
furious. And she goes, that's, she
labeled it, she goes, that's sexual harassment.
That's not OK. And I'd been calling her about
him putting his hands on me and feeling like weird and not
knowing how to handle it. And it put me in a weird
situation in the office with other people.
You know, it was just a weird thing and.
Then what was she saying? What would your mother say about
that? Because that's.
She was furious. She said I needed to make a
complaint right then, like she was telling me right then to
take action to put put my foot down.
So I did in a sense. I I said, no, I'm not going to
serve drinks. I didn't want to do it.
Marianne was furious with me. We had several, I call them our
hall meetings. She would Take Me Out in the
hallway and, like, scold me and tell me everything that I was
supposed to be doing. And, you know, my mom was very
fierce and very activist. And at this point, I was a
little more timid about that kind of thing.
Like I was more careful. And I really wanted a career.
And I was trying not to make this a huge deal.
I just wanted it to go away, right?
I just thought, if I just am quiet, it'll just go away.
And then But then by refusing, that sort of sent a message.
And then things got really icy in the office.
And so I went to talk to the chief of staff and, and told
him, you know, I, I didn't like it, you know, and.
Was this event that, yeah, this event you turned down, was this
a specific party of notoriety or was it just like a a Thursday
night kind of thing? I mean.
I don't even know what it was. It was like one of those I
can't, I think I remember it as like a fundraising.
So off site. It would have been off site.
I know that. But I, I remember it's kind of
being a fundraising, but I'm not sure.
And you're not allowed to have fundraising on the hill at that
point in that. So it was like something that
was being done, but they, but they would often have, you know,
they'd have staff do things differently than what their
roles were. But this was it.
It's just the way he presented it.
It was not OK. So OK, so that went by, right.
But then things get really frosty and then all of a sudden
I'm, I'm being sort of frosted out.
And but it's, it's the kind of environment where it's all hands
on deck. It's not as rigid as it is now
where everyone has their roles. I, you know, they were, you
know, everybody would have to pitch in to different offices.
Like for instance, I was helping the assistant press secretary.
I would go through speeches and do some editing.
I would go take notes out of hearing, you know, we, it was
just all hands on deck, that kind of thing.
And so I was doing that. I was actually correcting
something on the some document or whatever.
And I get this frantic, you know, ask from Mary Ann, she
comes running in, but she usually never does to where I
was and said, can you please take this?
He he forgot it, it was his gym bag and take it to him.
And I I remember. Him being Joe Biden.
Yes, and, and yeah, him. He's him.
So, so, yeah. So I had to go so I go, you
know, running after him towards the capital.
And as I'm going down, I remember like I, I remember
flashes. I don't remember exactly where I
am. And one of the things that I've
been careful about is because every day I worked there and
took sometimes different routes, sometimes the same, but it's
like trying to remember the exact route I took.
But I remember I went downstairs.
I remember my shins. I had my heels on it.
I wasn't wearing like sometimes you'll throw on tennis shoes or
different shoes because of the marble floors because they hurt.
But anyway, I remember my shins hurting.
I remember that that distinctly like more of the physical stuff
and going down, chasing him down and basically, and he's ahead of
me. I see him, he's talking to
someone, they walk away. And then we're like in his
corridor near the Capitol because we're going, you know,
remember this is the the he is coming from the Senate building,
from the Russell building. So then, you know, I'm just
focused on getting in this gym bag, right?
And then going back to what I was supposed to have this
document done. And I was really focused on that
document, but I was also kind of like, OK, I'm going to see Joe
Biden and hand him a gym bag, you know, whatever.
And then he said, was that a? Remarkable thing for you at that
moment. Would that have been a
remarkable experience for you in any way?
Well, I mean, not so much but but like, because I had just
seen him at another meeting and I was already kind of like not
sure how I felt about him. I was already kind of like half
liked him and half thought he was a little there was something
off. So I had mixed emotions, let's
put it that way. Is it good to have FaceTime with
the senator when you're working in the office at a low level?
Is that a A? Oh, it's huge.
It's huge. But my interactions low level
were kind of weird. That's so I wasn't sure what
this was going to be and I was right to worry.
So anyway, I handed him the gym bag and and said, you know, here
you go, Senator. I called him senator.
I didn't call him Joe. And he recognized my name.
You know, he said my name. And then next thing I knew, and
this part is really hard for me to describe because it wasn't
like, it wasn't like sequential. It was just all at once I was up
against a wall. And I remember the coldness of
the wall. And I remember, you know, I
remember him being underneath my clothes, like underneath my
shirt, underneath my skirt, like he was just, and you know, I had
absurd thoughts. I thought, where's the gym bag?
Like I remember thinking that, you know, which is an absurd
thought, but that's one of my vivid memories.
And, and he and I think I just didn't want what was happening
to be happening. And so he was saying things to
me and I can remember some of it, not all of it.
And he was kissing me and leaning in and it was, and I was
trying to pull back and I was and I remember the smell and
there was a smell that I didn't like.
It was like a dry cleaning smell.
And even when I talk about it, I get nauseous.
Like there's this a particular smell that if I ever smell it, I
get like immediately, like I'll but like I didn't want him near
me and, and he was forcing it and he used his leg to spread my
legs and he was saying he wanted to go, you know, he wanted to
fuck me. And he he said he got very
graphic and he said other things and.
How loud is he speaking? He very softly, it was like in
my ear, he was kissing me and doing it like in my ear.
And that's why it almost sounded in my mind echoey because it was
like right in my ear, right and and kissing me and I'm pulling
away this, you know, like away. And he doesn't seem to be taking
those signals. And then he penetrated me with
his fingers, and I managed to pull away.
And I remember, you know, my whole body was like shaking
because it wasn't just what he was doing, but it was like he
was, you know, it was him. And, you know, he had a lot of
power. And it was just really
frightening. And I just didn't want to be
part of what he was doing. And I was saying no.
And you know, he immediately did this thing that's really
disconcerting. He smiles when he's angry, which
is very disconcerting. I think a lot of the Americans
have seen that recently. He he smiles when he's very
angry and he used to do it like in meetings, if he was pissed
off at somebody or somebody pissed him off, he would smile
and then say something through his gritted teeth.
So anyway, at first he was saying, come on, man, I heard
you liked me. And then in my mind I'm
thinking, what did I do wrong? How did I get in this position?
Immediately I'm starting to think about like all my
behavior, like, what did I do? How did I get to this right, to
this moment? And then he all of a sudden
switched to that smiling and anger and had his, you know,
finger in my face. And he said, you're nothing.
You're nothing to me. And you're in public?
Yeah, there's no. Around at this point yet that I
know of maybe people were if they were I wouldn't even have
known I was like, you know what I mean?
I was tunnel vision into what he was, what was happening.
And I was shaking. And I remember my legs were
shaking so bad, it's almost like I could barely stand.
And, and he's, he, I think, immediately realized he'd gone
too far. Because after you said you're
nothing, you know, a couple of times and you know, and I, he
took me by the shoulders and he kind of shook me.
And he said, you're fine, You're OK, you're fine.
And then he took the gym bag and he whisked away and walked away.
And I was just standing there, still silent and still trying to
like, comprehend what had happened.
And he was already off and somebody was getting his
attention. And I remember I sunk down to
the stairs and the stairs, it's where they have the tall
windows. And I remember thinking it was
just, it was horrible. I mean, I knew like what he did
made me feel so gross. Like it just felt gross.
Just, I felt terrible and used and, and then on top of it, I
knew that was the end of my career.
Like I sat there and, and, and I was processing that.
So it wasn't just the actual assault and he and, you know,
and, and it hurt. It's not like he, he was being
gentle, right? It was like, you know, our knees
clashed. So my knee was hurting.
He, you know, he entered me with his fingers pretty violently and
this. Was not something that you were
physiologically prepared for. No.
And I I couldn't even comprehend it was an assault, but it was an
assault. And, but at the time, I didn't
even think of it in those terms. I just, I was just trying to
assimilate it. It was really hard.
And I knew in that moment my career was over.
Like it was over. It's just I, I can't because
though how angry he got and because he have how powerful he
was, I just had this moment that I knew my life was was forever
changed. Like that was it?
It was just sort of the sinking feeling and.
As you sat on the stairs, what what was your next move?
Where did you go next physically?
I, I went to the bathroom and cleaned up a bit and then I got
home and that part I, it's so odd.
I don't remember going back. I had to have gone back to the
office to get my purse, but I don't remember it at all.
Like, I just remember the next thing I remember is being home
and I was talking to my mom on the phone and she was screaming
at me and we got in this huge argument because she wanted me
to go right then to the police. Well, before I called her, I had
taken a shower and I had like taken a shower and I'd like
taken all my clothes, including my shoes and put them in a
garbage bag and took them down to a dumpster.
Like, I, I mean, I didn't even want the shoes I had on.
It was so I was just like, I was acting without thinking, if that
makes sense. And my mom was trying to anyway.
And the shower thing was like, I couldn't like, I remember my
scrubbing my face because I couldn't get rid of that smell,
that smell that it just, it just.
And my anyway, my mom was screaming at me to go to the
police. And I was like, it's the Capitol
Police. You know, they're not going to
help me. They're not going to help.
You know, they work for the, they work for the members of
Congress. They don't work for us.
What I didn't know at that time is that I could have gone to the
Metro Police. But probably, you know, it was
the 90s. Who knows how they would have
treated me. Who knows what would have
happened. But I didn't choose to do that.
I should have listened to my mother and I didn't.
She begged me. She even started sobbing on the
phone after she got mad. And then, you know, I but I just
wanted her to support me. I didn't want to be told what to
do. And so we got into this like
really bad argument. So that's how that went.
And then within the next day, I had talked to my brother, my
little brother. I put it in a little more
delicate terms because he was my little brother.
So, you know, you don't talk to your little siblings the same
way that you do. You know, your your parent.
And then I told my friend who worked in Kennedy's office
actually, and, and she's one of my witnesses, She would have
testified. She's one of my cooperating
witnesses. And she she knew what was going
on all along, like with Biden and everything and.
This was part of the girl talk that you guys had when you were
discussing your work. Yeah, yeah.
And then so when I I called her when this happened at the next
day and and I called her and she was devastated that that
happened to me. But we knew what it was, but we
didn't say the words. But she didn't think I should go
to the police either. You know, she was really worried
for me because, you know, people died, you know, like you'd hear
about like staffers, like there was a, there was someone who I,
I don't know, there was. You just didn't do that.
And then later you heard about what happened to Chandra Levy.
That was later after me, though. But still, you know, you, you,
you just, they had too much to lose these, these men.
And that's why, like when my my friend that I had helped, who
was crying, you know, on the side of the road, she was giving
ultimatums. And I remember, you know, my
friend and I talking to her saying, look, you can't they
have, they have everything to lose.
Like you can't do that. Don't put yourself in that
position. Put yourself in danger.
I want to just take a thought, just take a beat.
One of the things that is that is staying with me.
One of the things that's staying with me is the fact that this is
the 90s. There's no Internet and it was
probably the last time and probably will be the last time
in recorded history when people could really go disappear, when
things could go without. There were no cell phones
tracking your position everywhere.
There was no DNA analysis happening for minor crimes,
right? This wasn't a thing.
This is a totally different world that even people that are
my age and and older, they remember it, but it's a distant
memory in a lot of ways. I.
Mean. It's it's really hard to
process. You just talked about Chandra
Levy. I haven't heard that name
forever. You know, there was always that,
that weird fear that people in power could do things that maybe
they would. There was a there was a public
outrage that would happen that we don't have any more.
It's assumed that people are scum today.
I think in so many more ways, maybe the Internet has done
that, maybe the access of pornography, whatever it is,
there's been some cheapening in our society and our culture of
some of the human dignities. And so it's less, we're less
shocked. But that story would have been
truly shocking at that time and would have been really
dangerous. Yeah, and and you know, when I
tried to talk about it to my supervisors, 'cause I did
complain about the other part and I was going to get to the
part of what he did, I was really shut down.
Like they they just shut me down and they didn't.
It's almost like they knew something happened.
I don't know how but but one thing that do.
You think something like this was discussed behind scenes,
like, hey, this just happened. I just had a bad interaction.
You guys are going to have to step on this.
Could that have been, would that have been the kind of culture in
the office? Well.
You know, my friend thinks that he did it before and that
they've had to clean up a lot of messes.
That's what my friend thinks. I don't know.
I know that if we can unseal those files that are all, you
know, sealed at the University of Delaware, that'll be
interesting to see what complaints were made because
they're all sealed there. Rather, they have the complaints
from the office like the personnel files.
Why would they have those at the?
Back then, they didn't have a protocol like they do now.
So all of those complaints went back to the chief of staff.
And then the chief of staff chose how to secure records and
and Biden's office chose to put it in the University of Delaware
and seal it. And so it's out of touch.
You can't FOIA it because it's a university.
And this is really pre normalized HR human relations
type departments. I'm also just, I'm, I'm also
thinking about the just the administrative stuff that was
going on at that time. And I don't know, was there, was
there a big human resources department in the?
No, no, I mean, like, it was pretty disorganized.
They they, they, they called it the office of counseling or
something. So when I took the paper to
write to make that complaint, it was something called like a
counseling office, like this offshoot.
It was like going to, you know, this window and you filled out a
form almost like you're going to the dentist or doctor, right?
Like an intake form. And I filled it out and I did
not talk about, I know that I didn't talk about the assault.
I talked about, you know, the other stuff.
And, you know, I wanted to talk face to face with someone about
the what happened. And I didn't get a, no one
followed up, no one called. But what was interesting was one
of the the assistant press secretary who worked with Evelyn
Lieberman, who is the press secretary for Joe Biden, knew me
and he actually was dating one of the interns that I hired.
So again, like it's just through the atmosphere.
It's just crazy. But anyway, so I'm seeing them
out and we're out actually. And he said matter of factly to
me, when he found out that I had filed this paper, he said, Tara,
we will fucking destroy you. Direct quote.
So how do you go back to work in
that kind of an environment? It was pretty hard.
In fact, what they did was they made it seem like if they turn
it around so much, like they made it seem like it was my
fault. Like I had these meetings where
I was told that I wasn't dressed properly and I had to wear
longer dresses and not show my cleavage and things like that.
And then I was told I was taken. The intern duties were
immediately taken from me. I was put into a room with no
windows and had to. And I was told my job was to get
a job. And my supervisor said, you come
to me even if you have to go to the restroom, you don't leave
this office. And that all changed from the
time that you filed your complaint?
Oh yeah, that's that, that was after, right after.
That's all that what happened. And then I was applying for
other offices obviously, and no one would even interview me.
That's the black ball feeling you.
You went from someone saying do your job, go along to get along.
You have nice legs and so therefore you should be
delivering drinks at a fundraiser because that's what
the big man wants. That's what the guy who's
running the office says to you need to cover your cleavage and
you need to wear longer skirts and sit in A and ask for
permission to go pee. Is that accurate?
Yeah, that's pretty much it. What are you feeling at that
time? Pretty classic, you know,
retribution and, and all that stuff.
But I never saw the light of day, right?
So, so I went about my, my life. And then in 2019, I saw a young
politician named Lucy Flores getting torn to pieces by the
press because she dared to say she didn't like Joe Biden
kissing the top of her head without her permission and
putting his hands on her. And, you know, she thought of
him as like grandfather. At least she wasn't trying to
imply that it was sexual, but it creeped her out, right?
Then you had seven other women that had similar stories.
Well, there's even more, you know, and if you dig, there's
more. There's a Secret Service person
who complained that he would strip down naked in front of her
and swim laps and, and just the way he did it probably.
And we can imagine because I know.
I can imagine because I know how he acted.
He just thought of women as, as objects When when he did what he
did to me, it's not like there was emotion behind it.
I felt like I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time
almost. But it was like he wanted
pleasure in that moment. And I was in front of him and
that's what he wanted. That's it.
There was no like, he wasn't trying to woo me.
He wasn't trying to have an affair with me.
It was just basically he was trying to, you know.
Yeah. Do you do you remember that
movie Back to the Future? Oh gosh, vaguely.
Yeah. Yeah, I do with what's his name?
Marty McFly. He's wearing the vest.
What is his name? I know he has Parkinson.
Now I can't. Why can't I not think of his
name? But yeah, I can either, sorry.
Michael J Fox. It's Michael.
J Fox's. Great movie, 80s heroism, all
this kind of thing. I get this weird sense of
watching from the outside and I don't know if it's real or not,
but maybe it's just the stories I've read.
Maybe it's from talking to you. I see the bad guy in there, the
villain. The bully's name is Biff.
Do you remember Biff? Yeah, yeah.
And one of the things that I recall being so upset about when
I was a kid watching this was the way that he takes Marty
Mcfly's date, who's actually his mom, right?
Because it's the fact of the future.
But he takes her out of the dance and this is that classic
bully mentality. And he throws her in the car and
he's going up her very like ruffled poodle dress or whatever
it was. And he's reaching and he's
putting his hands on her in the car.
That's the classic like, get your damn hands off her.
And you know, the guy who's getting his arm beaten, you
know, hits him in the face. And that's the 80s story of
redemption, you know, and yet that that bully has been around
forever. It's a archetype.
And I don't know why I think of Joe Biden in that way in a lot
of ways. But the way that he seems to put
hands on women and the way that he acts about people and the way
that he talks, I'll take somebody out behind the gym.
That has always inspired me that.
And like I said, I don't know where it comes from, but.
On the hot mic, he said a few months ago he said no one fucks
with a Biden. Right, that's attitude though.
What? About the President of the
United States, That's like the mafia.
Yeah. I mean it's.
A cartoon bully from a from a 50s movie.
An 80s movie showing throwback. Me, he seemed very frat boy.
Very frat boy OK like, but the privileged, violent kind.
But that is the thing that we see in colleges like where you
think about, it's like the, the, the sexual predator move.
It's not like it's about lust and it's not about excitement
or, or love for somebody or even an attraction to it.
It's that that's the old thing we used to hear about in the 90s
about how sexual assault or rape is about power.
Because I can attitude, right? And, and you just mentioned, and
I, I heard the way you described it and I've, I visualized it.
I've taken sexual assault interviews from the, you know,
from the receiving end of it as a as law enforcement and also as
a paramedic. And those don't sound like
somebody who was figuring out what his move was.
That was the guy that knew how to put the moves on somebody.
And correct me if I'm wrong. And that's the way you described
it to me. That's what I heard.
You tell me if I'm not hearing it correctly.
It, it did seem looking back in retrospect, in the middle of it,
I couldn't really tell, but like looking back though, the way he
immediately kind of put it off on me, like, hey man, I heard
you liked me. Like immediately blaming me like
I'm right. And that I I.
And you said you thought this wasn't the first time it
happened. So you said you thought that
wasn't the first time it happened.
And and there's a reason why you think that way, but I I'm just
trying to suss that out. Yeah, I think, I think he was
very, because I look back at it now and it was the way he walked
away. He didn't look back.
He didn't like, he just literally walked away and then
went on. And I heard him jovially way
down, you know, because you can hear the echoing down the
hallway when he met up with someone.
It's like it didn't happen. It didn't exist.
Like he just got It was like an annoyance like OK, that didn't
work out. That annoyed my day.
Now I'm going to go do this. Right.
Yeah, it was going to go one way, but the day goes another
way. Yeah, Yeah.
There was no like, yeah. And now looking back at that,
now seeing him actually the way he is now, even though I know
that he's different now, he seems much weaker and he seems
obviously mentally, you know, like in a decline, but still
there's that element of arrogance.
It was the arrogance. That's what I was trying the
word. I was trying to look for just
this arrogance. Like he's above the law.
He can do whatever he wants. Yeah, the word that keeps
getting suggested, especially the culture you're talking
about, is entitlement. It seems like that's that's kind
of the the air of it. So you're looking for other
jobs, you're getting blackballed.
You're not getting other options.
What do you do? Well, I was with somebody at
that point. I probably wouldn't have gone
with him had I not been just assaulted.
And, you know, I, I made a bad choice with my ex-husband that I
ended up going with who he worked for another senator,
another Democrat, and we went off together and I went back to
California and we were married and I had my daughter and I
worked for Jack O'Connell, who was a state senator.
And when I was hired, I, of course, put down the reference
because the agreement was they would give me a reference.
That was the agreement I had with Ted Kaufman when I left.
Because, you know, I did have that file.
I did get a little pushed back a little bit.
I should have pushed back much harder, but I did push a bit on
Ted Kaufman and had a meeting with him.
And so I go, I get hired by Jack O'Connell.
Right. And before I get hired, though,
the chief of staff, Gavin, what's his last name?
Gavin. I can't remember his last name.
I almost said Gavin Newsom. That's the governor.
Yeah, it was Gavin. I can't remember his last name,
but he was the chief of staff there for, for O'Connell.
And he calls me up and he goes, Tara, you know, we were just
about to hire you. And then we got a bad reference
from Biden's office. And I said, really?
I said, could you do me a favor, Gavin?
Could you give me 30 minutes? And he said, sure.
OK. And so we hung up and I called
up Dennis Toner and who is my one of my supervisors.
And I reamed him out. I lost my temper on the phone.
And I said, you fucking get on that phone and you give him a
good reference. I have a baby.
And I will, I will blast you. I will, you know, you made an
agreement. And anyway, so then I get a call
20 minutes later from O'connell's office.
I mean, and they said, wow, we just got a call from Joe Biden's
office. And they were effusive and
apologized and said they didn't remember exactly who we were
talking about. And now they do and went on and
gave you a great reference. And we just decided anybody that
can get them to call back with that quickly deserves to be
hired. So I got that job.
And that is a skill set, so well done on that I guess.
I know and it's funny because I don't know if it was hormones or
what 'cause I just had a baby, but I was like you will fucking
give me a good preference. So I got tough.
Yeah, and there is something to be said.
You you start messing around with a Mama bear.
Yeah. We all know how that goes.
That was still in a Democrat's office.
Yes, I was still in a Democrat's office.
Still hadn't learned my lesson. Well, that being said, you, you
spent pretty much most of your adult life or at least certainly
your, your professional life working for Democrats.
And you mentioned was it Flores, you said that you didn't you
heard in 2019? Yes.
And you know, after that what I did was I, because of the
situation with my ex-husband, I, I'd moved to Seattle, we had a
very contentious divorce. His rights were terminated with
my daughter. And it was, it was pretty
abusive. And I ended up getting trained
by Seattle Police Department as a Victim Support person for
domestic violence victims. And I ended up going to law
school at Seattle U, went to law school, studied international
relations and got back into that geopolitical kind of world that
I liked a little bit with those classes.
And then also was an expert witness later on for, for
domestic violence victims and, and then even testified before
the Washington state legislature to help with laws that would
help victims of domestic violence.
And that was really gratifying work.
I really enjoyed it. And anyway, I was raising my
daughter and then she was during 2019.
She's an adult now, right? She's at this point, she's an
adult. And I see Lucy Flores from
Nevada just get torn to pieces along with the other women.
They're calling them lunatics and all these names, you know,
the Democratic press was just going after them.
And I knew what they were doing. They're planting articles, you
know, And my friend called me from DC, the one who was a
witness, and she said, Tara, did you see what they said?
They said that no one, no former employee of Biden has ever made
a complaint against him. And I said, yeah, I know.
I saw. And she said, are you going to
do something? And I said, yeah, I probably am.
So I did. I was.
Telling you this again, this is your friend from the yeah that
was living in the same. Dormant.
No, she, she, she was married and, you know, moved on with her
life, but she's living in Virginia.
And she was living there at the time.
She was in the DC vicinity. Yeah.
But she was. Yes, she was.
Yeah. We were all there, you know, So
she, we've stayed in touch over the years, even though I went
back to California and moved all over and, you know, but we
stayed in touch. So it was interesting because it
was really difficult for me again to come forward.
It had never occurred to me to go to the press.
I had told people in my life over the years, but I did.
And it hit the local press first because I went to like, just a
local newspaper and they published it.
And then, of course, it went to the bigger papers.
And I put my toe in the water. I was just like, so scared.
I talked about the harassment, but I didn't get into the sexual
assault. And finally I got a hold of Lisa
Layer from Layer from New York Times and during the summer and
I said, you know, there's something more and I just I just
have to say it, but I I need, you know, I was scared to do it.
And she said she got the message and I actually had was sorry she
didn't get it. I had called Ronan Farrow.
He didn't get a hold of me. He didn't know he had gotten the
messages. And so anyway, she got back to
me eventually. But besides that, I went to
Time's Up. And I went.
Time's Up is this organization that's supposed to help women
who have, you know, coming forward about powerful abusers.
And I was really wanting insulation to do this.
I wanted a lawyer and I wanted, you know, protection a bit.
And so my case was accepted initially.
And come to find out that Tina Chen was fundraising for Biden
and I didn't know it. And Hilary Rosen and who was
former Obama was was for, you know, of course, for Biden.
And then, you know, they were all working for Joe Biden
basically and on the payroll. So Knickerbocker, the public
relations firm, was actually received millions of dollars,
according to FEC, from the Biden campaign during the time I was
telling the story to them. You brought your story to a
group that was supposed to protect women from powerful men
that had also taken money from a powerful man that you were
making an allegation against. Yeah, so Anita Dunn was running
that and and so they never told me about the conflict of
interest. And then they said, oh, well,
this case is too political. And come to find out, because
Ryan Grimm exposed it, exposed Time's Up, and then later the
New York Times finally exposed them that they were working for
Biden the whole time. And they went after the Cuomo
survivors and they went after me.
And they literally brought, they literally just strung me along
so that they could get all the information from me and who my
witnesses were and anything they could extract.
And I remember the last thing they said to me was, can you
tell us any other names? Can you give us names of other
women regarding Biden? Because Biden's campaign was
scared. They knew, right?
And I didn't, of course. And, you know, now Time's Up has
been dismantled for corruption. Yeah.
Do me a favor and walk me back a couple of steps because you said
something that I think will be interesting to folks.
You took a job as a domestic violence victim advocate.
Is that did I say it correctly? Correct.
What drove you to that field and what sort of knowledge did you
gain by doing that work that affected your maybe 2019
decision? Well, what?
Well, that this as far as you know, because I was, I did
survive some pretty bad abuse for my ex-husband.
And, you know, in our family, my dad was pretty abusive.
And the training really helped me understand the dynamic of
power and control, which I didn't really understand until
that training. You know, I had, you know,
different kinds of trainings. But when you train with the
Seattle Police Department for domestic violence, it's a very
specific kind of training. And it also allowed me to look
at things more objectively instead of emotionally.
So it really gave me that distance to look at things as a
bigger picture. So you're not just, I don't
know, reliving your own story or your own kind of bad experience,
but you're actually empathizing with other people, trying to
help other people and, and getting out of your own self,
trying to do the bigger picture, if that makes sense.
So again, it was kind of like another public service thing,
but it was important to me to give back because I had been
helped when I was in domestic violence and my daughter and I
were were very much helped and I was able to go to law school,
you know, and, and work and, and move on.
So I wanted to give that opportunity to others as well.
When I saw, you know, and then with me too movement, I thought
I had this structure around me to speak out, whereas before it
never occurred to me to talk about what happened with Biden
to the media. I mean, it never even occurred
to me. My daughter, I would never while
she was in school, I would never have done that.
But also, I just felt like there was no mechanism to do that, if
that makes sense. And with the Me Too movement, I
felt like, OK, we're talking about this.
This happened. I experienced this from a person
who's running for office. And you have to recall, too,
during the time that I came forward, he wasn't the only
candidate and he wasn't the necessarily the pick.
Right there was a whole primary season going on.
Yeah, so I was trying to sound the warning alarm, and I've been
trying to sound it for a long time.
And I said this guy's a monster and he was my monster.
And now he's like the whole world's monster and taking us
close to World War Three. I you know.
I want to get into your activism in the middle too, because I
think that all plays into your current situation where you are.
I want to dig one more question about the training that you got
while you were doing that work. Did you guys discuss the
physiological and psychological reactions and the way the body
responds to either acute or long term trauma?
You know, we talked about the cycle of violence.
That was more the key of, and then with the cycle of violence
is, and I wish we had I, I, if I'd known we were going to talk
about this, I would have it that it's a Duluth model.
But basically it talks about the height, like when you're in a
cycle of violence with someone, an intimate partner, about how
you know, you'll go through like a honeymoon period and
everything will seem fine. And then it built, the tension
builds and then there's an explosion of violence.
So it was more, it was, it was like that.
I, you know, again, these were trainings, but they weren't
deep. You know, I didn't, I've never
taken psychology or anything like that.
So I can't really speak to that. I'm curious if you dealt with
victims, yeah, in close proximity to physical violence
with themselves and ever dealt with the shaking you mentioned.
I've heard you mentioned in every interview I've seen you
talk about it, and I'm curious if you know much about what was
going on there. I think personally, I think I
was in shock, but I, I, because I felt cold and I've been in
physical shock before from an injury and it felt like that.
It felt very similar just like that.
So I, I, I would say it's like that.
What I did learn is that people, victims like of domestic
violence would be disorganized with their thoughts, with their
executive functioning. And I did experience that as
well. So there was some similarities
there for sure. But and by executive
functioning, I mean, you know, it's like you can do one thing
but you can't do another. I don't know that's what I mean
by that, but it's. It's focusing on where's the gym
bag? Well, you should be trying to
figure out how do I get myself out of this place.
And so, you know, and so it was really beneficial for me and I
would recommend it for anyone who is trying to kind of
understand something that happened to them because it it
put it in an objective kind of scientific way, if that makes
sense. Like more you don't feel so
isolated or like you're the only person this has ever happened
to. And I think everyone, people
that had experienced things like that get that isolated feeling.
And yeah, so, and back then, you know, we just didn't talk about,
I don't even know how to, because I, because you have to
remember I did the training years later.
So for many years, you know, I would talk about it once in a
while, but you know, in the 90s and following the 90's, the
early 2000s, you didn't talk about things like that that
much. You just didn't.
It just wasn't talked about. Clear.
No, I agree, a lot of secrets kept.
There. There were, like you said, a lot
of secrets kept. There's a Are you, are you
familiar with the concept of a sympathetic nervous response to
the the so-called fight or flight or freeze syndrome?
Yes, and I would say looking back, I probably went into
freeze mode. It's the most common, but it,
but it's the, the physiological background of it.
And you learn this is a paramedic and you learn it if
you're somebody who goes into, you know, into a violent place
where I was trying to go in the military and, and in law
enforcement, there is a, a significant adrenal drum dump.
And that is when your body sends epinephrine into the bloodstream
and it does vasoconstriction and it sends all the peripheral
vasovasculature, all of your small blood vessels.
They shunt all the blood to the big places.
They need to be like your legs, like your arms, things that you
could fight to your heart. And so that's the feeling of
cold is that you lose all the heat.
You literally lose heat from your surface level skin because
that's irrelevant. What we need to do is we need to
put blood where we can react. And so they go to your eyes,
they go to your brain, they go to your heart.
And then when you're done with that moment and your your moment
has passed and doesn't matter if you drew your gun and shot
somebody or somebody attacked you, that runoff leaves people
with the shakes. It's universal across people
that experience a significant event.
OK. I haven't heard it explained
like that, but that's interesting.
OK, that explains a lot. OK.
It's it's a fundamentally like it's, it's a dinosaur brain,
human reaction significant. Threat.
OK, there you have it. Yeah.
And it's interesting because like there are things I don't
remember and things I do vividly.
And so that really frustrated me.
And I was reading other trauma, you know, professors recently,
like after I came forward, actually there was a trauma
professor that explained to me about why, because I was so
frustrated, there was trying to remember this one portion of
what happened. And no matter how hard I try, I
can't, it's a blank. It's a blank.
And I try and try and try. And they said that's like a
trauma response. Like there's parts probably that
are blanked out. It's just blanked out.
Yeah, I also think a lot of times when you, because I've
taken these notes, you know, you have somebody, something
happened, whether it's a car accident or an attack, and
you're trying to document like what happened next.
It's almost like the camera was pointed in a different direction
because your attention was how do I get out of these shoes
because my feet are hurting right now and my shins hurt.
But you're not able to focus on the thing that's happening
directly to you because that is too much for the brain to
process. So it goes to these, you know,
like you said, the executive functions are, are very confused
and muddled. It's very common and it's across
all types of trauma. It doesn't matter if it's sexual
or otherwise. So, you know, and it's
interesting because, you know, you know, looking back, you
know, Joe Biden was just very relaxed almost.
That's the predatory piece of it.
And and that's what was kind of chilling is that that was a
confrontation almost because I was pulling away and like
fighting it, right? And he's casual.
No, it's just like, at the time, I didn't think too much of it.
And now looking back at it, I'm like, oh, wow.
Like that's, that's why I think he's done it.
He did it before me and he did it after me and he doesn't think
anything of it. And and I think his, the
behavior that I've heard about his son is indicative of being a
child of a predator, right? Like he's been modeled to, you
know, But I wanted to touch on something you said
parasympathetic. So there's two sides to it.
There's the sympathetic. Is the reaction where you
actually are experiencing that fight or flight?
The parasympathetic is the opposite.
It's when you relax and you go the other way.
These are conflicting systems. Right, what I was going to say
is that part of healing trauma, like one of the things that I I
like is horses and what they've learned about trauma because
I've had other things happen to me that were actually almost
worse than what happened with Biden, believe it or not.
And what they said with about PTSD is that somatic healing is
really important, that talk therapy doesn't really work.
And so that's why, you know, equine therapy is really good
and things like that. And, you know, focusing forward,
I think that's, you know, a really beneficial thing for
people that have had something, you know, horrific happen like
what I did. But it wasn't just what
happened. It was the loss of the mentor.
It was the loss of the career. It was the loss of my standing
in my community. It was being, it was a betrayal,
you know, and then that went on, right?
So then I come forward and I'm thinking I'm doing a public
service. It's like a whistle blowing in a
way, right? Except it's about a personal
situation. And, you know, the media just
goes after me. You know, like jackals.
Yeah, talk about that. Obviously you didn't know you
were going up against a multi $1,000,000 PR firm that was
already in the know. But how, how is it received for
people who can't remember three years back?
You know, I remember hearing the allegation.
I didn't pay attention to a whole lot of it.
I didn't have interactions with you at the time.
I just went like, OK, that's a story.
And you know, we, we listen to the story and then you try to
figure out if it's credible or not.
The media did their own thing. They did something different.
Oh, they attacked me. Beth Reinhardt, Pulitzer Prize
winner, right, reporter. She was my first interview with
The Washington Post, and she said the first thing she said
out of her mouth. And I wrote about this in my
book. She goes, Tara, do you don't you
realize that this is going to hurt Joe Biden's campaign?
You know, because like she's trying to speak to me like I'm
some Democrat, like my allegation, right?
And then she goes into talking about the allegation, you know,
when she's interviewing me, trying to get me to give her the
details and she's like with stopping her up being goes.
So she it was really gross. She she said so did he touch
your clitoris? Did you get pleasure from that?
I mean, these are the kinds of questions a Pulitzer Prize
winner, the reporter asked me. She, she, she had me down in
tears. Like I was literally by the end
of the interview, I was in tears and I was sick.
Why do you think she was that awful?
She just attacked me like, you know, in other words, she was
implying like, even if he did it, you probably liked it.
You know, it was just awful. It was, it was probably one of
the most ugly things I've ever been through and.
How did that compare to the others that talked to you?
Well, they were equally horrible, but not as graphic.
But you know, Lisa Lehrer was more earn your trust, earn the
trust, earn the trust and then betray.
That was her thing, you know, and then do the hit piece.
And they made it all about the fact that I was a Russian asset
that because that's when the Russian agent, everybody who
wasn't agreeing with Democrats was a Russian agent.
That's when that was rolling out against Donald Trump, against
any Republican. That's, you know, it just was it
was ridiculous. And so, of course, Lisa Lehrer
even said when they approached the Biden campaign, the only
thing he did was the campaign faxed back.
They wouldn't answer about the assault.
They would fax back something saying that I was something
about one of my posts that I made about Russia that was
positive, implying I was a Russian agent.
So it was just stupid. So it was a way to just distract
the whole conversation. What was the allegation that was
made that tied you to Russia? Because I publicly had spoken
out about a couple of specific things.
I said that Biden, if he were elected, would take us to war
with Russia. And I said that in 2019, and he
did. But anyway, but at that time,
nobody was going to hear that, right?
That was a conspiracy theory. I'm, you know, or whatever.
And I said positive things about Vladimir Putin because I said I
think he's a good leader. He simply takes care of his
people. That's all it took.
Basically. I had said I was writing a novel
about Russia and America, and I was writing about.
Something from the Cold War up through to the current time.
And I was trying to because the Russophobia was kind of coming
up and I was writing it from a geopolitical kind of sense.
But it was a novel. So I was in the middle of
writing that. And that they pulled a bunch of
the pieces of the novel that were, you know, posted in a
writing group that I was in and made it seem like I was somehow
tied to the Russian government. And were you?
No Niet. Miyat, she says when you were
growing up when you were growing up.
Tell me about your impression of Russia from your the childhood
and it's. Interesting.
My cousin, actually I'm, I have a cousin that's Russian.
So by marriage and so it was always very positive.
I, I didn't, you know, we were taught in school.
I, I was, I, I'm too young, excuse me to be under the desk.
Like, I know people older than me had to like practice, you
know, nuclear war and stuff. That was before my time.
But like, for me, it was just sort of the rhetoric.
We were told basically that America won World War 2.
And it's like, you know, Leningrad didn't even exist.
Like the the whole stand against, you know, and all the
losses that the Soviet Union suffered.
Touch on that just for a second, because I I always like to give
people a little bit of history and I think people don't have a
good concept of the, the number of losses the Soviets had during
World War 2. 27,000,000 Yeah. Including civilians, right?
Yeah. I think close to 20 or like 19
or 20 million in uniform, something like that.
Right. It was like a third of the
country was like dust, like it was burned.
Yeah, and do you know how many in the Allied side lost their
lives? No. 500,000 United States,
500,000 Great Britain. So just the the losses were 20X
plus for the Russians and the Soviets at that time.
People don't have any. Contact John.
John Kennedy gave that eloquent quote where he said we owe the
Soviet Union a debt we can never repay, you know?
And that's something. Yeah, so, so, yeah, I was kind
of grew up with the Cold War mentality, although my mother,
you know, remember my great grandmother was a communist, you
know, and followed like Jack Reed.
She was into women's right to vote.
They were into different thinking, intellectual thinking.
So I was exposed to Karl Marx when I was a little girl.
I brought a book of Karl Marx to school and we had the stump out
in Wisconsin. It was like this little red
schoolhouse and we would take turns getting on the stump,
doing different things, talking, singing, reading, you know,
playing whatever. We were all, you know, little
whatever. And so I have my Karl Marx book
for my Big Brothers and, and I was explaining it.
God knows how I explained it at 8 years old, because that was
probably would have been, I wish I had a recording of it because
God knows what I said. But it was enough to where the
kids went home and talked about it and about how maybe there
wasn't a God and that maybe Karl Marx, other stuff, you know, and
I come from a Catholic background.
A lot of the kids there in Wisconsin are Lutheran.
And yeah, it was. It was funny because.
I can only imagine how this went over.
My parents got a call and they said they had to go in and my
mom had to go in and and they said, you know, Tara is showing
some leadership qualities and we like that, but we need to figure
out a different thing for her because and she can't bring her
Karl Marx book to the school because.
She might be organizing A revolt, A Marxist revolt, and
and they might be moving around the means of production for
education. Well, check this out.
So this is what they did. They made me a bus patrol and
they I got to wear the orange sash with the, with the with,
you know, the badge turned into a total fascist.
I loved it. I was like going after, you
know, the older boys that would pick on people.
They gave you a little bit of authority, it went straight to
your head and you became a. Fascist.
I was Marxism to fascism, just like that.
Like a you know, like a typical Democrat, right?
Like like it can happen on to anybody given the right amount
of power and the wrong kind of ideas.
I know, so I got to sit at the front of the bus with my orange
sass so. And tell people what to do.
That's all I had to do is give me my uniform.
It's so good. That's very, very funny.
All right, so from Marxism to fascism, that'll be your next
book. You have written one book about
your story, and I think it plays into why you are where you are,
if I understand correctly. Obviously, you got torn apart in
the mainstream press here. You were not received the way
you expected. I think that is pretty evident.
And you went from being someone who in theory had some
alliances, probably historically, to the Democrat
Party. Who received you?
Did anyone receive you? Well, did anyone take your story
and say we believe you? Behind the scenes, right?
But they won't say it publicly. So that was really frustrating.
Like you want. To name any names.
Oh yeah, like Chris Wallace, right?
Said his. Wife.
Was groped by him when, when Joe Biden was the vice president.
And I don't mind saying it because, you know, they should
be talking about this. He's a media person.
He should be telling the truth. And it's bullshit that I have to
stand out here on my own. And, you know, but yeah, he, he
had that problem. Now, you had that Senator Brown
just came forward about his wife getting roped and that he was
going to kick the shit out of Biden, is what he told them,
right? So I I.
Didn't hear that one tell. Tell that story if you would.
Well, I, I don't really know it personally.
I just know it's been in the media just last few days.
But, and of course, only in the conservative media, they're not.
That's what I'm getting at. Yeah, but Brown was a Democrat,
a friend of Joe Biden's, and basically said those words, said
I will kick the shit out of you if you do that again.
But he was groped. His wife, he had his hand all
over her ass basically at A at a function where there's cameras
or whatever. And he he groped her and he
didn't. And you know, he didn't like it.
He defended his wife. Yeah, so.
Well, luckily he didn't. It was this.
I wonder how recently that was. Was that something that.
Just happened. We did mention that there was
mental decline, so it must have been recently.
Interesting. So, yeah.
And so, yeah, look, look up that article with Brown, though,
that's he's a former representative.
And, you know, you know, you have a lot of people that are
coming forward as far as like, you know, behind the scenes, you
know, Democrats coming to me. No, not a word.
In fact, I wrote before I went public, I wrote to Bernie
Sanders, I wrote to Elizabeth Warren, I wrote to a OCI, wrote
to Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein, 'cause they were in
my districts, you know, in California that you know, time
and silence. No Christy Blasey Ford type
Christine Blasey Ford reaction. No, no response at all.
Except Elizabeth Warren sent me back a fundraising letter, so
they got it. Yeah, it's a tone, but it was a
form letter. But yeah, no.
And, you know, it's not like I was just someone random.
I mean, I was a staffer and they could see that I was a staffer.
So yeah, they just chose to ignore it.
AOC. 2 Yeah, Let's talk about a, a word that has been thrown
around quite a bit. I'm trying to see if I have the
There it is. There's the definition of it.
This is coming from Wikipedia, the word defection.
Defection is when a person leaves their home country in a
way that the home country claims to be illegal.
To the first country, they can be seen as a traitor.
It is a political label used by authoritarian countries.
This is from left-leaning Wikipedia.
I just pulled that up, but before we started talking,
people have said that you have defected.
You are now in Moscow. I am now in Moscow, Russia, yes,
Defected, you know, and also usually is used in terms of like
military or, you know, someone who is working, you know, in
that capacity, you know, and I'm not that.
So I yeah, they're there. There it is, defecting, yeah.
It's right. When I was younger, defectors
were people who were flying like a Mig 28 and they decided to
leave Cuba and land and Florida airspace, put it down on the
tarmac and claim asylum, real asylum, and say I am defecting
to the United States. I'm bringing whatever I have and
you can have my plane, right? Right.
That's the recollection I have of that word.
I've never heard of this for. Someone.
It's more of like, if you're in a military conflict, Russia's
not supposed to be our enemy right now.
Officially, right? Have we declared war?
Officially, no, not. That I've seen, although we seem
to be doing a multi billion dollar proxy.
Yeah, we're doing a multi billion dollar proxy.
But my point is, is that, you know, it's it's it's an odd
term, but yeah. So I, you know, I, I'm really
lucky that I was able to not be taken into custody because I
think the next thing, the next phase, because of how loud I
continued to be about Joe Biden and kept pressing the issue.
And then I was about to testify before Congress, you know.
Yeah, let's set, let's set the stage for this.
There are two things that I think that were going on.
One, you were speaking out about Joe Biden and I've heard that
and and many people will not know that you had a pretty
strong anti war position that you were speaking out about.
Is that correct? Talk about your anti war
activism and whether you think that was playing into any of the
you know, we always talk about potentiation like one thing
makes another thing worse if you think that that was involved.
Well, I, I really chose because my platform was small, right?
But I had a little 1 and I thought, well, you know what,
I'm going to use this for something.
And you know, and I don't think of myself as a victim, right?
I, I'm kind of, I don't like that, you know, I, I chose to
look at this in a different way. This happened a long time ago.
It was wrong. It's never been investigated.
It should have been. And it cost me my career.
That was wrong. And so I wanted to make it so
that no one else had to suffer that.
That's how I wanted to approach it.
I didn't want to like get into the whole victim space and get
into all of that. I simply wanted to tell the
truth and get some real something close to justice.
And when it became obvious that wasn't going to happen, I
decided, OK, I have this little platform, what can I do with it?
Well, the bigger issue became very quickly early on in the
administration for Biden was was the proxy war.
And so I decided, you know, and all the Russophobia stuff.
And I decided, you know what? I'm going to push back on this.
I'm going to use my voice to push back on this and align
myself with other people who are pushing back on this, other anti
imperialist voices, you know, like the Gray zone, like
antiwar.com and and like frankly some of the libertarian and
conservative voices in Tucker Carlson.
You know, I was on Tucker Carlson show 3 * 1 of those
times. Of course, I was talking about,
you know, I was talking about, you know, what happened.
But then the other two, I was talking about something totally
different. And one of them I talked about,
I got to speak at the Rage Against the War Machine and we
had libertarians, Republicans and some lefties.
You have people from all over the political spectrum all
saying the same thing. Quit sending our tax money over
to this country and having a proxy war when we need
infrastructure at home, when we need homes for 600,000 people,
when we need, you know, inflation to go down.
Now I know my me talking about inflation is going to make the
CIA very angry because they said that in USA TODAY.
They were. They were very A former CIA
agent saw me complaining, he said, about the US.
That made him viscerally angry. Can you pull up the the the
picture from the USA TODAY Ryan? I know we sent that article
over. Makes the makes the CIA mad for
you to talk about the money. There it is.
A Biden accuser. Tara Reid.
Bolts. Bolts.
That's a good one. You.
Yeah, that's what happened. And so she fears for her safety.
So you're speaking out about the war effort.
That's a pretty traditional lefty 'cause I would say that
let's give peace a chance. That was always the chant in the
60s and the 70s, right? You said you had a brother who
was a conscientious objector. That sounds like that was kind
of mom's ethos. That was definitely in your
house putting words into your mouth, but stop me anytime and
then now you still. Have that my dad.
My dad was tongued. Well, that's the other thing.
If your dad was more conservative and was more
aligned with the establishment, that was always kind of a right
wing position. It's like, yeah, bombs cost
money and money equals jobs and those are all good things.
So war is a good business and right.
I mean, the people always accuse the Republicans of being war
Hawks. Yeah.
So now I was aligning myself with a lot of Republicans.
And if you notice, you know, Donald Trump, you know, I I
didn't vote for him, but he didn't get as close to war.
Yeah. What do you think about that?
You weren't a Donald Trump voter.
No, I wasn't. What do you?
What do you think about the guy looking from the looking from
Moscow? What do you think about Donald
Trump in the last, let's say, 7 years that you've seen when he
didn't vote for him? Well, I, I think what I saw was
that he actually, he obviously did a better job than Joe Biden
is doing OK economically. Just from an objective point of
view. He didn't get us.
He got us out of wars and into wars.
And he, you know, was fighting the whole time against a
bureaucracy that wanted him out and was persecuting him and
accusing him of ties to Russia, which he didn't have.
And that was proven that that didn't exist.
And it was all, you know, something that was manufactured
by Democrats, you know, to maintain power and to get him
out. And, you know, it also kind of
solidified for me in my mind how much power people like Anthony
Blinken and Victoria Nuland and, you know, John Kirby and people
like that have. The bureaucrats behind the
scenes are the ones running the show with the military
industrial complex. And now they're going after, now
Donald Trump is the political opposition and they're taking
him out. OK, so let's look at this.
They're taking out the political opposition.
It's been shown that they've been weaponizing the DOJ and the
FBI and social media and other things to go after U.S. citizens
that aren't for this proxy war or that maybe want to vote for
Donald Trump. And you have also, you have
agencies going after people with religious beliefs.
Does that sound like a democracy?
I know we have a we have a Republican.
It doesn't sound very much like a Democratic Republic in any
way. No, it didn't sound like a
Democratic Republic. So I tweeted something, I shared
something the other day. I said the country I grew up in
would have invaded the country that I live in.
What do you think about that idea?
I think that's a, a really interesting quote because I
think you're right. And you know, and we're coming
to the point where I talk about why I left and you know, it
wasn't I, I was actually coming to Moscow, Russia because of
this book. And I have an interpreter and I
was coming in person to oversee it.
And I packed for one week. And let me tell you, I mean,
people have like said, oh, you planned or whatever.
No, I didn't. In fact, I didn't say there's a
lot of regrets I have. I didn't say if I had known what
was going to happen, I would have said goodbye differently.
I would have spent my last few days differently.
I would have packed differently, but I didn't.
I packed for a week and thought I was coming right back.
And, you know, and it became clear.
It was becoming clear. I was getting a lot of death
threats during that time. I was getting nervous.
I reached out to you, Kyle, As a matter of fact, Remember.
Yeah. I remember you calling me and
asking me a question that I couldn't answer and I would have
no way to know. And I thought, Oh my God, this
poor woman. Like I, I remember thinking
like, I have no, no way to help you.
You also called me right in the middle of some really chaotic
times on our end. And I thought it, it's
everywhere. And you know, you can only fight
so many battles at once. But as I recall, you asked me,
is there an open FBI case on me at the time?
Is that? Is that about?
Right. Yeah, Yeah, I wanted to know and
I did get an answer to that question elsewhere.
But what it turned out to be is that, you know, as far as like,
I don't know all the details of what is going on.
I know there's a sealed indictment.
I know that I had gotten a message that there was a Red
notices, Interpol Red notices, which are, it's an international
red notice where they'll arrest you at that airport.
So I had, you know, you can't go to Moscow directly.
You have to go through Istanbul, Turkey or Dubai.
And so I'd gone through Istanbul, Turkey into Moscow.
And so we've now like put out, you know, a request to see if if
I had the Red notice, like what countries those Interpol notices
are and things like that. These are international arrest
warrants. Right.
And what I've been told, or what's assumed is that there was
something about, I want to get this right, Farah, which is the
Foreign Registration Act, and that's like the back door into
the Espionage Act and conspiracy and possibly violation of
sanctions. So it was like a little bit of a
laundry list of things coming my way.
And it would have allowed them while they were sorting it out
to the the US can hold you for 18 months without charges and
they can hold you in foreign prisons that long.
Like for instance if I was in Istanbul, Turkey and had a red
notice, they could just hold me for months there.
In a Turkish Persian. Yep.
I don't, I don't know. Well, I have a human.
Rights attorney. So that's.
Right, and then, and that's the other thing I I know you have
people that are working on your behalf that are concerned about
this kind of thing. Folks, if you have some
different experience and it's professional and it's going to
be constructive, put it in the comments below.
By all means. We'll always read those kind of
things, especially if it takes off the the heat off someone.
OK, so you packed for a one week trip to go and do a translation
of a book. Can we throw the book on the on
the screen for a second here? Tell us what what drove you to
write the book? The Left Out When the Truth
Doesn't Fit in was actually published in 2020 and it was
about what happened and the media out, you know how they
really big basically crushed me and social media, you know, with
bots and democratic bots and things like that.
When after my family, I mean, they went after my family, my
friends, everything. And so I write about that in the
book, a little bit about my childhood, about the event
itself, and I even write about Russia and being accused of
being a Russian agent in that book.
And so I was adding a chapter to the book through this company
here, the international publishing company in Moscow,
and they were translating it into Russian.
And so while I was overseeing that, then, you know, it became
clear that I might not be able to if I went home, I could have
been facing, you know, years in jail.
And in the middle of all of this, I had been talking to Matt
Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Green about testifying before
Congress. I'd had a long interview with
them. Did.
They reach out to you or did you reach to them?
They reached out to me and they were going to and if you can see
on Twitter, if you look through the history, you can see some of
the comments that Matt Gaetz gave.
He believed me and supported me. And he still, you know, he still
does and he, but I'm in Moscow, Russia.
So it's like, you know, whatever, but.
You're kind of untouchable in some ways now.
Yes, but he basically I reached out to his legal counsel and to
him and when I was in Moscow because they wanted me to come
to DC and. I didn't go, obviously, I stayed
in Russia, but I called him and he was one of the reasons why I
stayed, not the whole reason. He didn't give me advice.
He just simply gave me information.
And I'm glad he gave me honest information.
He gave me an honest take on it. He just said, Tara, you know,
I'm worried for your physical safety.
I know how these people operate, you know, and, and he was not
just talking about the legal stuff.
I had gotten a lot of threats on my life.
And remember, Matt Gaetz is close to, you know, the
intelligence community. So I think he had, you know, he
knows like how dangerous it is for whistleblowers and
witnesses. And he was concerned for my
safety and told me that. And he, you know, he basically
said as far as the legal stuff goes, he he couldn't, you know,
there's no way they can protect me from that.
I like, you know. There's no way, yeah, DOJ does
what it does. Is this an appropriate time to
play the the Kirby video that we have?
Yeah, yeah. And then?
Set set up the video and and where you were when you received
it if you would, and I'll have Ryan play it when you say so.
So I gave a press conference in Russia and I explained why I was
asking for asylum in Russia because I wanted people to know
that I was being intimidated and being kept from from testifying
against Biden. And then apparently, John Kirby
decided that he needed to give a press conference and talk about
it. So here it is.
Tara Reid, who was an aide to then Senator Biden back in the
90s and then in 2020 accused him of sexual assault.
She announced yesterday she's seeking citizenship in Russia
and she feels safer there. Does the White House have any
reaction to that announcement, given the accusations that she's
made against? President, we'd be load the.
Comment on the on the musings of a potential Russian citizen.
That's really up for her to. To speak to does.
The White House believe that her allegations may have been
motivated by her allegations to affinity for Russia.
Difficult to say. I mean, I can't get inside her,
her head and, and, and speak for her motivations and intentions.
That's really for her to speak to.
The one thing I will say is that the allegations that her life
was at risk by the United States government, absolutely false,
baseless. There's nothing to that.
What do you think when you see that?
Yeah. Well, he said it, so it must be
true, right? Yeah, I kind of took it like
opposite world. Like when he says you're safe,
you're not safe because he says a lot of things, right?
He's, you know, the head of the NSA.
So. Where where were you when you
saw that video first? I was in Russia, so I watched it
and I was having, you know, those ambivalent feelings like,
well, maybe I can go back. And then I saw that and I was
like, oh, OK, no. And he gave 2, by the way, there
were, that was one of them. He gave another set of comments
too. So he was pretty.
Anyway, my lawyer said I I think I made the NSA mad so.
Oh well done. So apparently they had different
plans and I didn't follow the Yeah.
You weren't following what they expected.
Well, here's the thing that we found and, and I think that you
and I share this, is that they have an, there's an expectation
of what you will do and there's a playbook that people do
because that's how the success has been achieved.
And stifling stories from going public, whatever those stories
may be. And when you go outside of the,
the, the boundaries, when you color outside of the lines, it
upsets them. And also it makes them do things
that they don't know what to do with you.
And it gives you at least a little bit of wiggle room.
And I'm, I'm very appreciative that you're sharing your story
here with us because I think that people should hear it.
I hope there's some more journalists that will look into
it and, and follow up on some of the allegations on there.
For what it's worth, you talked to you.
I know you sat down with Tucker three times.
He brought up your story. Obviously you have some private
moments when you guys 'cause you were in person doing the
interviews, right? How did he receive you?
He was very warm, like at first, you know, he was like didn't
know what to make of me. And then after talking to me
afterwards, he became very warm and gave me his phone number.
He said he believed me and he wanted to talk to me more.
And he, you know, because we had like a 3 1/2 hour conversation,
an hour ended up hour and a half or whatever ended up in the
interview. But he, he and I saw eye to eye
and a lot of things anti, he's very anti imperialist.
He's a libertarian and I think there's parts of me that are
very libertarian too. So we kind of bonded on those
political belief systems. I didn't anticipate at the time,
you know, that he would be fired.
And, you know, now he's, of course he doesn't.
He can have his own platform. He'll do his own thing.
He'll be fine. But still, he was doing such
great work. I I'm really shocked, although I
shouldn't be, but I still am, that he was, you know, removed.
But he was also open to hearing about Russia, you know, and,
and, you know, I have to say, Kyle, I think that what people
don't understand in America is that there's a lot of propaganda
to try to keep us from knowing the truth about Russia.
And I think it's not just political about, you know,
tension. I think what it is is they don't
want us to know how good the life is here.
Their economy is booming despite the sanctions, and it's very
clean. It's very efficient city in
Moscow. I've been to other cities, I've
been to the Caucasus, I've been to Saint Petersburg, I've been
to Sochi. And I've seen, you know, the
countryside. I've taken a train and seen
other small towns. Some of them don't have as much
as others. But here you see a scene of this
is Red Square near the Kremlin, and you see the the.
This is your video. This is video you shot just
walking around. Just walking around, people are
happy and content there. You have a very thriving middle
class. A very and here is from a boat I
took a little. They have boat tours almost
every day you can take and it's a really nice kind of way to see
the city. Where are the homeless people?
You don't see homeless people, and in fact, 80 to 90% of
Moscovites own their own apartments and even a dasha.
So we're talking young people out of college.
It's very easy to own homes. What?
Is that percentage?
80 to 90% that own it outright. Not a bank owns it.
Like I thought that meant a mortgage but it doesn't.
I was wrong. It's it outright.
This is a subway system that you're seeing here.
If you look at it, look how beautiful it is.
They look like museums. Each stops unique and different
and and they're always very clean, very efficient.
They run every two or three minutes.
You can go anywhere in the city. Who's playing the music and
pooping on the side of the platform?
Well, you know what? There are sometimes musicians
like, but you'll hear classical music as opposed to other
things. And yeah, you don't see any kind
of of that. Like there's nothing like that.
And you don't even see a lot of police.
That's what's really interesting.
It's not like you constantly see police because you don't.
It's, it's just a really well run city.
They're there, I'm sure security's there, everything's
monitored. But again, they, there's a
social net I think for people that have struggles.
So they have homes and they have basic food needs taken care of
and transportation's cheap. So like workers that have to
work across the city, like let's say 30 minute commute or
whatever, it's 500 rubles, which is about $0.50.
And and that train, like if you miss one, there's 1-2 minutes
later and then there's another 1-2 minutes later.
It's 550 cents. What was I saying?
It's 100 rupals is a dollar. Is that not what I saw recently?
No, no, I don't. I don't know.
But I think I it's about $0.50 is how much the subway is.
So if I got the the denominations wrong, I probably
did. And yeah, I always tip too much
and people are always stopping don't tip that much.
They. Yeah, I got that when I was in
Poland many years ago. Yeah, I did that in Poland when
the money was like water there. We had 4-5 X.
Like your dollar went so much further at that point.
And I remember people telling me, no, you know, like I think
$13 paid for, you know, meal for two people.
And then on top of that, it also was like a 50% tip and people
looked at you like you were a rich person act.
And I was like, I'm just trying to be not like $13 is not that
much money to me, even though I had no money at the top.
Well, you. Know what the wages, the wages
are a little lower in Russia, but the cost of living is so
much lower for the people. So they have their
transportation pretty well taken care of.
Education is paid for. Medical is very cheap.
I have to have like something done with the with amri thing.
An MRI, which is thousands of dollars in the US is $200 in, in
Moscow to pay out of pocket. And most places have insurance,
so it's free. And you know, there's a big
state system for, for medical too.
You know, it's not, I'm not saying, I'm not here to say
everything's perfect. I'm just here to say I think
we've been kept from knowing how good it is because they're
capitalistic. They, and, and I see people in
their comments communist, blah, blah, blah.
They're not communist at all. This is a very thriving economy
of capitalism, but it's not crony capitalism.
And that's the difference. And in the US, we're suffering
right now under the weight of crony capitalism.
So it's very top heavy and nothing in between.
And then poverty, you know, it's just poverty.
Whereas in Russia, you know, it's growing, it's new
capitalism is relatively new, and you're seeing a thriving
middle class. This is Gorky Park.
Gorky Park is one of the big major parks, kind of like
Central Park in New York. It's quite beautiful, it looks
like. The IT looks like the Queen's
Gardens in in London. It's, it's one of the few
sections and there's places where they just let it go wild
and there's wildflowers. There's, there's skate park,
there's a concert area, there's a huge pond where you can take
little boats and there's Swans. I mean, it's a huge park.
Like I only got like 1 little piece of it.
There's parks all over the place.
They, they put a lot of emphasis on greenery in Moscow.
And one of the things that I found really striking here is,
you know, when you're in New York, there's like this kinetic
energy. It's very intense and you're
always kind of on guard and it's.
Hectic. Mm hmm.
It's dangerous. Moscow's as big as New York.
But you don't. It's more relaxed.
You have people moving quickly, right?
Because people can rent scooters and bikes everywhere.
They're everywhere. You just rent them with your app
and everyone's moving really fast, but yet there's a calmness
and like when you're in the parks, you see a lot of
families, very traditional families.
There's an earnestness. If someone hears me speak
English, they run up and they want to talk to me and they're
really, there's no animosity. I've never not experienced it
one time. Why?
I've been here and I've been here now four months.
So since May 20th I've been here.
It's gone fast too, hasn't it? So and there's been no like they
they don't feel animosity towards Americans.
So all of this hatred that in vitrol coming from Washington DC
is really sad. Let.
Me, let me throw a, a, a mirror image at you, 1980s.
We're thinking about Russia in the United States and we think
that it's Gray and it's dingy and it's economically depressed
and they're losing the Cold War and they've lost freedoms.
They have totalitarianism over them.
And all the things that we heard, I don't know if they're
true or not because I wasn't there, but probably wasn't
great. And then we always heard that
there was a constant traded effort.
Do you remember, did we just lose our feed?
There it is. So do you do you remember like
they were always saying that the Russians, we had the Radio Free
Europe movements, we were always trying to broadcast in behind
the Iron Curtain. We were trying to let them know
that things were better and that you could overthrow the, you
know, communist overlords and and live freedom.
That was the American push and they were and the, and the
theoretically the, the government there of the USSR was
trying to stop that. And now I feel like maybe we've
switched roles based on what you're saying.
I don't know if it's 100% true, but I trust you as a human
being. I'm sure your experience is
being honest. Have we just swapped places?
I'm wondering, I'm thinking the same thing because like what
this has been feeling like to me being here because I didn't
really expect it to be this nice, right?
Like I kind of even though I was pushing back on risophobia, I
still was indoctrinated to think of Russia a certain way.
And I had to be here to really experience it to see like, wow,
this is completely different than what I thought.
And they have like super modern and, you know, really cool
things going on and innovation that we don't have right now in
the US And it's like you said, we switched roles.
But it's it's nostalgic for me of what the 80s were like in
America. Like there was an innocence.
There was something different, right?
Right now, I feel like the United States is like what the
Soviet Union was right before it collapsed.
I really am concerned that and I don't want that to happen to the
country that I was born in, but I feel like under Biden, and if
it continues and it goes to like Gavin Newsom and they continue
with the same path, I think the government is going to collapse.
I think that it is collapsing because of the culture and and
everything it's it's, you know, become eroded.
One thing that that about Putin that's interesting is he chose
to ban Monsanto and to ban hormones and foods.
He was watching the culture and he and you know, like they say
he's anti that he's a anti LGBT, which isn't true.
I thought he was anti shirt. He just likes to ride bears.
That's what I was under the. Impression of but but like what
with the Russian culture is Orthodox Christian and so LGBT.
They're very concerned about children and they're, they are
very concerned about children. Like you'll go into a bookstore
and there are books that are not allowed for children under 18
and they're wrapped a certain way.
I mean, they protect their children.
They want them to have their innocence.
Like the 80s. Yeah.
And I think that that's OK. Like, what's wrong with that?
What's wrong with protecting children?
They don't need to know everything, right?
Like right away. They need to be able to grow and
then assimilate things in a natural way.
But but anyway, back to Monsanto, they don't allow, you
know, a lot of the, the pesticides here and, and in
Europe too, there are certain countries in Europe that also
banned them. But he just, he just saw all the
illness and all the carcinogens in the food and he decided to,
to do all that. So that got implemented a few
years ago. And they have so like you don't
have to look for organic food. It's everywhere you go.
I saw the pictures that you sent me.
There's not a lot of people that look like American classic
obesity, unhealthy looking kind of mom and dads struggling with
overweight kids and things like that.
I didn't see that. I mean, Ryan can roll some of
the footage while you're talking, but you mentioned
something about the health of the middle class there.
It was kind of impressive to me. And we're just looking at people
in the city. So maybe that's what people in
cities look like, but. No, no, no.
It's, it's like that. I mean, there are people of all
different kinds of sizes, right? And different backgrounds.
I mean, Russia's very diverse actually, with different
cultures and different religions and whatnot.
But you notice a lot of fit people because they don't have
poison in their food. Their food's not poisoned.
And you have access to activities, you walk a lot, you
have access to gyms, things are cheaper and there's not the air
of desperation. Like look at, look at if you
looked at those footages, you saw the calmness, people going
about their business that was during.
Yeah, it kind of freaks me out, to be honest.
Like I don't see people. They look like they're in a like
a movie set maybe. Yeah, so that's, that's, I mean,
it's been a real, they talk about culture shock.
The culture shock has been realizing how bad things are in
the US and that's been hard. And I know that again, it makes
the CIA officers mad. Sorry boys, but it's the truth.
They're hiding it from us. They've taken our country into
disarray and ruin. And I've just, I'm in a country
where they're building and they believe innovation.
I I showed a clip from Trading Spaces.
Do you remember that movie with Eddie Murphy?
It's the 80s movie about Wall Street.
I. Never saw it though.
Oh, you're not missing a whole lot.
I mean, it's just a cutesy movie, but you know, classic
Eddie Murphy stuff. And, and I've been watching 80s
movies. I've been watching early 90s
movies with my kids. It's like walking back in time.
It's like looking at a thing that was calmer.
I I just watched honey I shrunk the kids.
This is probably overshare but I watched My wife Found it for 5
bucks. You remember Rick Morandis is in
it. Can't remember the name of the
female actress but she's in a lot of movies and she's great.
And the kids are cute. They're sweet, right?
And the story was the mom and the dad had a fight and she's
out and staying at her sisters and she calls on the phone and
she wishes him good luck, honey. And it's not the story of
divorce, although that was very common in the 80s and the 90s.
We experienced a lot of that. It was she said, we need to put
this family back together. And so that was the the message
that came out of out of Hollywood.
And in a lot of ways, if people want to look back in time, they
can see how much more hopeful it was.
Part of it was probably the cocaine in the 80s, but there
was a hope that existed like you just talked about.
And I think so many people that are learnt looking for that and
are upset about the way America looks right now.
I feel like a lot of us are looking for, it's a nostalgia
feeling for for my childhood, for your childhood, which is to
say that end of Cold War era where there was a lot of
possibilities. And there's a big sadness when
it's gone because it feels like we lost something really
important and our kids are not going to get it.
Your daughter just graduated from grad school.
I know you called me yesterday to tell me about that.
And she's. Not going to inherit that same
world. She's not walking into the same
world that you did. No, she's walking into a world
of a lot of broken people that need a lot of help.
And, you know, I have to say, you know, I, it's been hard to
to suddenly go to a different country and then ask for safety
because I, I just refused to go home and be put in a cage or to
have, you know, be threatened anymore.
So I decided to stay here in Russia.
I did apply for asylum. I'm waiting for my final
paperwork and citizenship. My dream was to have both like
to, to go back and forth, right. But I don't know if that'll be
possible. I don't know when I'll be able
to go back to the United States. So one of the difficult
conversations I had to have with my daughter was, you know, I
don't know when I'll see her again.
And that was a conversation of many tears over the course of
many weeks here. But she also is of the mind that
I'm safer here and it's better for me to be here.
I wasn't going to be and, and, and just, you know, I wasn't
allowed to work. I wasn't allowed to function.
I was they were just on me about little things.
Now it's taxes, you know, and before it was this or that.
And it's just everything, you know it, you know, they just
come at you with everything. And you know, when when the DOJ
gets weaponized like it did. And I think the most important
thing for people to do right now is to understand how weaponized
our government is against its own citizens.
Not this is I could I am everyone, right?
Like I could be anyone. They're weaponized against you,
Kyle, because you spoke up. They're weaponized against the
former President Donald Trump. Monday he's going to be maybe
put in jail. With 19 other people who it's
just, it's mind boggling to me. You I I haven't disclosed this
on our show before, but we're talking and we're sharing
stories and so I'll share the story.
I got a bill for about $10,000 for insurance that I didn't know
that I had because the FBI kicked me out of the office and
they said that I owed them back money.
I don't intend to pay them that. And then they sent me another
bill through e-mail and they said that you owe us $10,000 for
the move that we paid for to move you to a job that we
cancelled you from in New Mexico.
And I've been dealing with that on the back end.
So you talk about the weaponization and hassling you
over little things like taxes. And this is not a little space
because. It's the administrative
bullshit, Yeah, it's over and over again.
It's the FBI. It's the DOJ sending you a bill
and saying were coming for you. And then they also sent me a
letter that said they accused me of 10 different crimes that they
were investigating with their internal affairs division
because I was an employee unless I quit, which I did because I
don't need them anymore. And honestly, I didn't consider
myself an employee there if they wanted me to break up with them
because they broke up with me already.
I did the same. And I don't mean to make it
about me in this case, but I I do think that is the kinship
that you and I have. Here's up with America, you
know. Which is, which is what we were
talking about yesterday. And, and I know you called me
and, and, and you were tearful about it.
And I, I can, I, we started off and I was like, Oh my God, like,
what do we? I don't even know what to say to
you. But here's the questions that I
think people are going to have. Were you scared getting on that
plane to go there and translate the book?
And if not, did something change when you were there?
No, I mean, I had like, I was scared about the death threats
and stuff like that, but I was excited about seeing Moscow.
But I was coming right back. It was like a quick trip.
So I didn't have that in my mind.
I was more apprehensive about like, you know, testifying
before Congress later on. That was something, Were they
going to come after me again? And, you know, the death threats
are really concerning me because I had people show up at my
daughter's house and try to break in.
I mean, there's police reports. My horse was almost stolen back
in 2020 and then again when I was here in Russia.
So that's happened, you know, so, so I had the anxiety about
that stuff. I'd call it anxiety, but I was
excited about going for one week to Russia and seeing it finally
with my own eyes. And then when it was clear I
couldn't go back, that was. And then, yeah, I just.
I would. But one thing stopped.
I was here. I stopped having like the panic
attacks I was having, almost like you and I were talking
about how like how scary it is, how you lay at four or five in
the morning wondering if that's the day, the knots going to
come. That's the day.
Is this the day? Is this the day?
And you just. And it's like you're waiting for
that other shoe to drop, you know, because I've been
threatened so many times that the FBI was going to come raid
me or bring me into custody for what I don't, you know,
whatever. Yeah, your cortisol levels are
off the chart. It's like living in a war zone.
I mean, it's a psychological war, but it's a war nonetheless.
Yeah, and they went after people I knew so like that who were
group, they raided them and then they went after them and now
they're they took away their passports and they're in prison.
They're going to face 8 to 10 years in prison for sowing
discord, which I mean, shoot. I do that every day I feel.
Like you have an American right to sow discord.
It's actually part of the 1st Amendment.
Not anymore, not according to the recent DOJ.
So merit, not under Merrick Garland, you know, not under
Biden. So that's what we're looking at.
We're looking at the loss of our liberty, our freedom of
expression, our freedom of speech and our ability to
whistleblow, our ability to call out what's wrong and make it
better. And I think that that's the, you
know, that's that's a damn shame.
And I, I really get annoyed when people say I'm not a patriot
because I'm not. First of all, I'm not like, I've
never been like you, Kyle, OK? I didn't work for the FBI.
I wasn't like, you know, like that.
But I did work for the Senate and the Congress and I took it
seriously. And I, and I did like being a
public servant. And I do care about my country
and I care about my fellow Americans.
I don't like Biden and I don't like that regime.
And it is a regime. They're basically making money
off our taxes. And they're, they're, you know,
laundering it basically. You know, I think about my
father. My father's dead.
My mother's dead. And we were pretty estranged.
But I wonder what he would think about all the military
contracts. He probably would have made
money. But like, would he have been OK
with it? Because it's gotten really ugly,
I mean. I always ask people, what's the
cost? If you say yes and you go along
with it and you get your paycheck and you get your
retirement and your pension or you get a big, you know, payday
from a contract, where are you gonna spend that?
You gonna spend that in America? That's tyrannical.
That's the real question. So now you know, what I wanna do
is testify before Congress from Moscow.
And I wish there was a way I could do that.
I want to I'll. Bring my laptop in.
They can. They can go to me.
They don't even have to use any U.S. government stuff.
I'm more than happy to pay for the connection that's.
All there, tell Matt Gaetz like we're.
Telling him right now we're telling Matt Gaetz, Matt Gaetz,
let's set this thing up. I want to see a remote testimony
from Moscow. Look, there is precedent for
things that are quote UN quote enemies.
They brought in the Japanese submarine commander who sunk the
USS Indianapolis at the end of World War 2.
And they brought him in for a court martial and they had him
go and convict the captain of the USS Indianapolis of failing
to zig and zag properly in this military tribunal.
There. There is plenty of reasons that
you might bring somebody in from another country that might even
be considered hostile. So I I think doing it digitally
in the, in the COVID era, the post COVID world we live in, you
can do it instantaneously. It'll be really late your time.
That's the only thing you have to be doing a late night.
I don't care. I want to do it, you know, you
know, it would mean a lot to me. I know, I I know I'm never going
to get justice, right? Like, I know that.
But I would like to make it easier for the person behind me.
And, and right now, I feel like they might get the impression
that, Oh yeah, this works. This playbook works.
We chased her away. I'm continuing my work.
I'm going to keep working, keep exposing Biden.
So I'm not going to shut up and I'm going to keep keep pushing
because we need now. I have the freedom to do it and
I I don't have the DOJ hanging over my head.
Can you imagine the the the little 8 year old girl that was
standing on the stump that was reading Karl Marx to her
classmates? Could she have ever fathomed
that you would have sought a safe haven in former Soviet
Russia from the United States? Is that?
Is that the most? Is that a thing you could ever
even imagine anytime in your life?
No, no, I really didn't see that coming.
In fact, I didn't see it coming that I would be accused of being
a Russian agent by Biden's people.
So that was a sideways thing when that happened.
Yeah. So this is all been very much a
surprise. But you know, you, you take what
I've learned is to, you know, adapt and survive.
You know, survive and adapt and adapt and survive.
And that's what you do. And but there's no reason why I
can't thrive here. There's no reason why I can't
rebuild my life. Somehow I'll be able to maybe
come back to my country of origin, but I don't know if it's
going to act like if, if, if there it's going to continue to
have leaders like but Joe Biden, then no, there's no reason for
me to go back. But you know, I'll go back when
it's safe and say hi. Otherwise, people are going to
have to come here and see me. And they might especially I, I
keep hear people who say, why don't you go to Russia?
I hear there's a great expat community.
And it's like, I keep hearing that too.
And you say it like it's a mean thing.
I keep wondering, you're rolling around, you don't even speak
Russian and you seem to be doing OK, which is kind of amazing.
I'm not. I don't want to leave my country
either. I don't want to take my kids
anywhere else. But you know, first and
foremost, but it is, it is truly interesting to see that I want
to, I want to buzz you about your interactions with the
Russian government. What have they been and and and
with what agencies and and what kind of people?
I haven't really had any interactions other than like
going to the office to sign up for the paperwork for the asylum
and then doing that process and they ask you a few questions and
then now it's just in that bureaucratic, wherever it is
space on someone's desk I assume and that's it.
Now I'm just waiting. So I haven't had much, you know,
I've been working with my podcast.
I work with TNT Radio, which is out of Australia.
And I do, I do some commentary for RT once in a while, but
that's it. And as far as expat, no, it's
Russia Today. Russia Today, sorry.
And as far as expats, you're mentioning that I have met
Irish, English, Australians that have come here and I have met
people that have sought asylum and then have made their life
here and are much happier and they said they don't want to go
back even if they could. What?
What are they? What are they looking for?
What are they finding? They're finding not they're not
having to be afraid to have their political or religious
beliefs, whatever that is. Some of them are like Orthodox
Christian or just Catholic. They're feeling like a sense of
home for their children. They have, many of them have
children and have them in school and said it's just a much
superior education system and that it's free, you know, and
that I mean, private school costs money, but like not, you
know, know what it is in the US And it's just, it's just a much
more thriving economy. Like it's more moving towards
the future. So they're excited about it.
People are more accepting. It's a it's a kind of a laid
back in a way. I know it sounds so odd because
right now there's a war raging, but I have to say it's pretty
laid back. It's not because you're not
having the sense of desperation that's going on in the cities
right now, in Seattle and in San Francisco and in New York and in
some of the rural communities in.
Chicago. You don't have the drugs here.
There's no, they're very strict about drugs.
There is no drug use and no, marijuana is not legal.
So if you're into that, that's not the place for you.
It's not legal and it's not wanted.
So they're very strict about all drugs.
What about alcohol abuse? I always hear that a lot of
Russians die from from abusing alcohol.
Is that something you're seeing at all in the city?
I've seen two drunks, like I've seen some drunk men.
I haven't seen like what they're talking about.
That's more from the 90s when there was like no money and
people were literally just like it was pretty bad.
Are we just getting disinformation that's just been
fed from like a 90s like hit reel?
Is that what's going on? I mean, I I wouldn't put it past
anybody at this point. I think alcoholism, they have a
push back against alcoholism here because I think, you know,
it was a problem. It's like Ireland too, Irish
people and English people up at the pub, you know, it's kind of
that. But like, no, they, they have a
real push back against alcoholism and that kind of
thing here. But during the 90s there was a
lot of alcoholism. So that's kind of the stereotype
from that, I think. But yeah, you don't hear like,
like right now it's the middle of the night and you can my
windows are open. Sirens.
You don't hear sirens, you don't hear people shouting, you don't
hear anything like that ever. Rarely.
I don't know. I've never even seen a fight.
And I've walked around. And the other thing that's
really cool is I can walk around at night as a woman and feel
safe. I don't feel worried.
It's everything's well lit. There's a usually a lot of
people out because, you know, it's summertime and it's warm
and it gets light early, but there are quiet times when
there's not a lot of people and it's still feels safe.
When you go down under bridges, like Gorky Park has the section
where you go along the river and then you go down underneath this
bridge. I remember I kind of had this,
like, bracing myself because, you know, like in the cities, in
Seattle or New York, you go down under a bridge, there's going to
be homeless people, druggies possibly getting, you know,
robbed or whatever. No, it's like you go down
underneath the bridge and there's just more families
walking and people going to the metro or going wherever.
And it was like, OK, this is really safe.
I mean, it's a city, so I'm sure there's pickpockets.
You got to, you know, watch your stuff a bit.
But I haven't had anything happen.
I have been lost pretty much almost every day.
I'll be honest, it's I have a bad sense of direction.
But anyway. But you know, they will go out
of their way to help me. Like someone will see me on my
phone just looking confused and they'll walk up and go, you
know, in Russian. Do you need help?
And then I'll say, I don't speak Russian.
And then they'll say, oh, I speak Choo Choo English.
And then they'll try to help me. And I never know where I am
because the names of the streets are so long.
And, you know, so I, I'm, I'm struggling with the language of
it. But overall, I'm, I'm getting
along fine, you know? It's, it's, that's so crazy.
There's a scorpion song that's called winds of change that
keeps running through my head that won't put, you know what
I'm talking about. There's a, a whistle solo in
there and they talk about going through Gorky Park and how
things are changing. And anyway, I, I just all of our
conversation yesterday and today has led me to think about that
and it's. It, it really is, you know, I
think the East is, you know, it's, it's becoming multipolar
world and the East is rising and the West is falling.
You're pissing off the CIA again.
Why would you do that on my process?
I know, I know, but but the West, all the West has to do is
become a partner and become like part of it.
So then there's the competition is not with war machines but
with just economic like Donald Trump.
You know, I have to go back to Donald Trump because I'm not.
Again, I never supported him in the past, but he did make a
point. Economic competition is what you
want. You don't want more.
You just want healthy competition and then you have
innovation. He.
Converted you? How did he do this?
I think by watching him, like, fight through all those
indictments. My goodness, My goodness.
I Yeah. Yeah, you're, so you're
experiencing a little, you know, your own taste of it.
I think that many people empathize with the Donald Trump
scenario. Is there?
Have you ever had a conversation over there about what's going on
here? Does anyone even know what we're
doing to ourselves? Yeah, I mean, at RT I've made my
commentaries. They know my positions, so they
understand. What do they talk about?
There's a lot of questions. Actually, they try to be more
defending of US. It's kind of interesting.
They think I'm a little harsh because because to some of the
young people, especially here, they think America is going to
be great because that was the image they had.
And I'm like, no, it's not great right now.
It's not great. You don't want to go there.
And they think they want to go there.
And I'm like, no, they. Because imagine they'd be
suffering Russophobia. Yeah.
And they might even end up in jail because the United States
is so mean to Russian nationals like what they did to Maria
Butina. She was not a spy.
And everybody knows that.
There's even an article say that that's called the spy who wasn't
She was totally speed up and and made and actually they used her
case the same judge that's indicting Trump indicted Maria
Butina and using the FARA Act, which was never used before.
Which is not being used on Charlie Mcgonigal, by the way.
It is not. No.
OK, So what? OK.
Anything about that? I don't know, it's like upside
down world. There's no counts of FARA
violations in the indictments that I've seen, despite the fact
that he was receiving money and working on behalf of I'm an
oligarch. Yeah, interesting.
And you theoretically were facing it.
Up is down, huh? And I'm not working.
Yeah. And I'm definitely not working
for an oligarch. Yeah.
And, and you know, the, the, when, when they make people out
to be Putin, you know, agents or whatever, it's like he must have
so many people on payroll. Oh man, yeah, I sounds.
Great. And why are so many of us
poorly? Wealthy.
No but but seriously though the that case is really interesting
to me because he was accusing other people of what he was
doing. It's just I mean he works in the
FBI that how did he go to work every day and do and face his Co
workers? Sociopath maybe?
I don't know, I don't get it. It doesn't make any sense to me
at least. Robert Hanson was like a nervous
wreck all the time is what everyone says, that he basically
was constantly, you know, had explosive temper and had all the
pressure of what was going on. And I just interviewed his
girlfriend. You can go back and watch it on
our show. I did it on Monday this week and
you can watch her talk about it. And she said he didn't go off in
the air. He didn't care.
He walked around. He had a family, he had a wife.
He was hanging out with her. She thought it was cool.
He was introducing her as his girlfriend to to the wife's
cousin, rented Rice's cousin, rented the apartment for him,
presented as girlfriend as far as she knows.
Like they may have never even had any separation then he may
have been married the whole time.
He's obviously back with the wife right now.
Just bizarro world. And you know, I grew up watching
Robert Hansen and alter James like basically get thrown in
prison forever. That's what we used to do to
people that betrayed the country in the oath, and now we got
people like you that ran to the country that we were being
betrayed to. How do you feel?
How do you feel like, does that, does that make you feel
uncomfortable in some ways when you have me, when you hear me
sing the praises of Russia? Because I'm just telling you my
real experience right now. No, it doesn't bother me at all.
It just makes me know how far this America is not what it was.
I mean, we're a nation that is post constitutional.
I feel like I say it a lot of times on our show, I I feel like
we've, we've abandoned the principles that were why we were
so proud of being American. Do you think Biden's going to be
held accountable or Hunter Biden are going to be accountable for?
Anything. Walk.
No, see, I'm not, I'm I'm not objective.
And there's just this little part of me that thinks the good
guys are going to win, you know, that they're going to be the
their villainy really is going to be exposed.
But I know realistically that's not.
I think realistically the only way that something really I
don't know the path. I just tweeted about this the
other day, so I put it in public already.
I already own it, but I don't know how we avoid violence in
this country because when you when you weaponize the federal
government and you delegitimize the things that are supposed to
be sacrosanct, like our judiciary, a blind Lady Justice
that's supposed to weigh people. You know, we always knew that
the the people who had more money and more access got a
little bit of a better deal. That was always the case.
Everyone always knew that if you had a little more money, you
could, you know, hire a better defense attorney.
And maybe that defense attorney plays golf with the judge and
maybe you get a sweetheart deal. Like that was always there.
Everyone knew that. But he didn't think that the FBI
was going to kick down your door and shoot you if you were 75
years old and overweight because you were an asshole.
Like, and I don't know the guy. Maybe he wasn't.
Maybe he was a really sweetheart and he was just an asshole of
mine. I have an uncle that reminds me
of the guy they just shot. Do you know the FBI shot a guy
today? They.
Did no you're. Memphis, you're not going to
hear about it. That's three in a week.
We've shot all SWAT shots and I'm sure they were all
justified. That's the other problem.
But like, imagine, imagine a federal police force in another
country that that has shot three citizens for violations of the
law or whatever. It's just, man, I can't remember
a time when that was the thing in the FBI.
You're not even talking about it.
I mean, you know, they. Never do.
They never do. They control that media.
It doesn't get out there. You want to talk about the stuff
that we used to see when we were younger looking at the Soviet
Union, It's like, of course, they quashed the story.
Of course, the only press that is doing it is the Free Press.
Right now the only people that are reporting on this stuff is
local news and the suspendables. Me and my buddies.
And that's crazy. So it doesn't bother me that
people are saying things are I just know that if you say things
nice about Russia, then people are going to go and say the same
thing about me that they said about you, which is that I'm a
Russian agent, which is freaking hilarious.
Like I've got, I got AI got a Smith and Wesson here that was
made on the year that I was born.
It's a American revolver. I get about as red blooded as it
gets. I got American flags all over
the place. I don't have any tattoos, but if
I did, it would probably be an American flag.
And yet they will accuse you of calling out this country when
it's doing things that are wrong.
Well, and it's not even calling out the country, it's calling
out the elites that are running it, the ones that are
benefiting. And you know, like my, my thing
about Leon Panetta that I'm so disappointed about is that when
I knew him as an intern, I looked up to him and I and I
really thought he was serious and really wanted to do good
things. And now I see his path.
And he literally was just all about the power.
His son was ordained basically as a congressman in the same
district as if it's now royalty. These Democrats think that.
OK, now, Grassley. Is trying to do the same thing.
Yeah. He's trying to give it to.
His grandson, right, Or whatever I think grandson.
Grandson, yeah. It's like.
Because he's 1000 years old. Because he's, he's almost 100
years old right now. That's why.
And people love Chuck Grassley. They get mad at you when you
when you call out any of their sacred cows.
But look, I don't care if you're Mitch McConnell or if you're
Dianne Feinstein or if you're Chuck Grassley or if you're Joe
Biden, you're too freaking old. And honestly, I think Donald
Trump is too old. But he may be the only way that
he stays out of jail. And so I can get behind the idea
of it. I was not 100% behind Donald
Trump until the 3rd indictment. And then it's like, man, are you
kidding me? Look, I wanted to have a
comeback like freaking Sly Stallone did in Rocky 8 or
whatever, Rocky 11, 'cause they it's like, I can't have the guy
lose on that. You can't send the man to jail
because he doesn't win the election.
That sounds horrific. That sounds like what I thought
Russia was like when I was a kid.
Yeah, And I, I just think it's so sad the way, you know, this
is all kind of unfolding and and they're just blatant about it.
They're not trying to hide it. Like the Democratic Party is not
even hiding it. They're not there's like they're
they're just every time there's a new thing about Hunter Biden
and a new revelation about the bribery and the scandals around
around the money laundering in Ukraine and Romania and China,
boom, there's another indictment for Trump.
And but now these are serious ones that are in the states are
are going to be harder. Those are going to be hard for
him. Yeah.
There's an argument. There's an argument that's being
made right now. Mark Meadows is trying to bring
his case federally. I talked about it on the show
that they're, they're literally trying to bring it up.
It's the same thing that you do when a a federal agent gets
involved in a shooting. What they'll do is they try to
federalize the case under the fact that the person was
operating under federal authority and fulfilling their
federal job. And then the supremacy clause
comes in. And then in theory, you get
tried in federal court and or it gets dismissed by the DOJ
because the DOJ is not going to go do it because they understand
the Constitution. And yet we have a weaponized DOJ
too. So the only way this works is if
this man gets in office, which is crazy.
I don't want to vote who the president of the United States
is based on whether or not that guy should go to jail because
our country is unfair. I, I wasn't mad about his
policies. I thought he did a good job
until the COVID lockdown. So it's like, all right, fine.
If, if I have to choose the lesser of two evils, it's no
brainer. Donald Trump wins that hands
down. You know, and yet.
And that and that phrase. The luster of two evils, though,
is really kind of sad, isn't? It it's always been there, has
it not? Evil is just evil, so there's
not lesser than. Well, there was always, it was
always a lesser than, I feel like nobody ever personally, you
know, nobody's ever perfectly represented you and no one's
ever perfectly represented me. And so we were always choosing
somebody who agreed with us most of the time.
But the idea that if you didn't agree with them, they'd put you
in jail is a new that's new. And so I, I took action and I
decided to not go back and face that because, you know, the
frankly, you know, and I said this to you yesterday when I was
kind of cheerful, like, I'm just not finding anything about my
case. I can't, you know, I mean, I'm
going to miss my daughter's wedding.
I'm going to miss my daughter's graduation for masters.
I'm missing these life events. This is heartbreaking, you know,
and it's my country. I was born in Monterey, CA and I
loved it and never see it maybe again.
And it's simply because I told the truth, right?
It doesn't make any sense. And I'm trying to like make
sense of it and it doesn't. And it's hard and I don't want
anybody to have to go through what I'm going through.
But if I'm going to have to make that choice and I have to live
here, I'm going to make the best of it.
And frankly, I'm kind of lucky in a way, because at least I
have a roof over my head. I have a way to make a living.
I have people that care about me already.
I mean, they're very loving and caring here.
And, and that's the thing you always hear about Russians being
really cold. I've now experienced that.
They're very warm, very loving, and they smile at you.
That's all a bunch of bullshit. I was at the subway the other
day and someone smiled at me and I smiled back.
Like, you know, all the all these myths they do give, you
know, space like it takes a while to get to know someone.
But that's also in most cities like it takes.
And that's a very Slavic thing anyhow.
I just feel like all Slavs are like that.
Yeah, so there you have it. But anyway, do you have a faith
tradition that you you? On.
Catholic. Do you go to Catholic mass?
I was gonna try to actually, I was gonna look at some of the
Orthodox Christian churches 'cause they're really beautiful
and I was going to look at that. But yes, there's a beautiful
Catholic Church here, a couple of them, yeah.
And there's actually a priest here that is friends of a
British man that I know who he wanted to introduce me to an
Irish priest. I love it.
Well, you, if you go, you give me the update on that.
I hope you'll come back and give us an update on your status too.
You don't have to be a stranger anytime you want to come on here
and let us know what's going on. Give us a different wider
perspective on there and I'll figure out a time that I can
come on and be on your, your TNT show as well.
I'd be happy to if we'll, we'll work out a time to do a tape
delay since folks, if you don't know, I know it's getting very,
very late there. Tell people where they can reach
out to you and give messages to support where they can buy your
book and all that kind of stuff. Just kind of plug all the things
that you might do because I know people are going to want to know
more. I kind of made it easy.
It's one place, tarareidpodcast.com.
So Reade is how you spell. My last name,
tarareidpodcast.com. It's where you have links to my
book, links to everything and my Twitter account at Reid
Alexandra. You can find me rage tweeting
once in a while. Sometimes I'm tweeting nice
videos of Moscow. It depends on my mood.
I rage tweet Biden a couple times today.
You can have fun with that. I know.
Yeah. And do you know that your do you
know that your hardcover book is selling for a dollar cheaper
than your soft back your paperback book on Amazon?
It's funny. I don't know why, but it is.
Yeah. It's kind of fun.
And people can find your memoir there.
Yeah. And I'm doing the audible I'm.
Adding actually what's coming. With the book is.
I'm adding an epilogue called Moscow, so I'm going to talk
about. Moscow and I'm also doing an
audio version of the book so that's coming.
Fantastic. Yeah.
Does Rose McGowan. She does the four.
She does the four word, which is amazing because she is
definitely a lefty and probably not a.
Big Donald Trump fan and yet there are things you can all
agree on that people shouldn't have to be victims of powerful
people. Well, Tara, thanks so much for
spending more hours than you planned on with us.
I do really appreciate it. I really enjoy talking to you.
I'm glad that you look better than the last time I talked to
you. You look less stressed.
And I, I hope that is the case. Even though it's tough to be
away, I'm I'm glad you're in a place where you feel safer
because I know what that war looks like and what it what it,
what it does. It's exhausting.
So and good luck to you too and your family.
Please give your family my love. Take care.
I will absolutely. All right.
Thanks so much. You've been listening to the
Kyle Seraphin Show streamed. Live from Liberty Hill, TX,
America and we are very grateful to you for joining us.
Thanks so much. Please consider giving us a five
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like this one here from Falcion. Falcolone says love the show. 5
stars, spicy takes on the state of America.
Great guests just like this one. Today we want to say thanks to
Tara Reid for joining us from Moscow and giving you her inside
story, the the scoop on what she's living through, why she
made the decision to stay over there.
I think it's pretty chilling, but I think it's really
important that we hear these things.
We do want to say thanks to all the folks that it takes to build
the show up. Our guests, you and our
technical producer Ryan Maddow, who does a fantastic job.
Please follow Ryan on Twitter at Ryan Matta Media.
That's MATTA. You can also find him on true
social at Ryan Matta MATTA. You can find him later on this
day on Rumble on LFA TV show. His show Matta A fact MATTA.
You get the pattern. You know what's going on here,
folks. Don't forget to like this video.
Scroll on down. Give it that thumbs up that
Green piss off the CIA if that's what it's doing.
Upset those who are trying to run counterintelligence cases on
American citizens who simply have some disagreements with our
political structure. And we will see you again
tomorrow for Friendly Friday. Hang in there.
I know it's getting rough out there folks, but we're going to
keep telling the stories and we'll see you soon.
Thanks for listening to the Kyle Serafin Show, streamed live
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Serafin.