Ashley Biden's alleged cocaine video

Vice President Joe Biden’s daughter, Ashley, might want to pick her friends more carefully, said Joanna Molloy in the New York Daily News. One so-called buddy is trying to sell video that allegedly shows her snorting cocaine. Nobody knows whether the footage is real—but "now that daddy's the No. 2 man in the government" Ashley Biden should "know she's a target for people looking to make a quick buck at her expense.”

It wouldn't be a shocker if the brown-haired woman at the Wilmington, Del., house party turned out to be the young Biden, said Owen Thomas in Gawker. Ashley Biden is a social worker these days, but “she wasn't always a goodie-two-shoes." She was arrested in 2002, at 21, on a misdemeanor charge of obstructing police “in a brawl outside a Chicago bar.”

If the 90 seconds of the 43-minute tape viewed by the New York Post is genuine, said Mike Baron in the Post Chronicle, the 27-year-old daughter of the vice president and Jill Biden is in big trouble. This “is particularly distressful considering her father has been a crusader against drugs”—it was Joe Biden who in 1982 “coined the phrase 'drug czar.’”

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The woman in the tape does look like Ashley Biden, said Elizabeth Snead in the Los Angeles Times, but “so do a few million other girls.” There are several inconsistencies regarding the “source, veracity, and the identity of the person" in the hidden-camera tape, and the Washington lawyer who represented the tape’s owner has quit. This could be “a political faux blow.”