Former US Senate staffer and RT contributor Tara Reade applied for asylum in the country two years agoRussian President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree granting citizenship to RT contributor and former US Senate aide Tara Reade. Reade worked as a Senate aide for Joe Biden in the early 1990s before accusing him in 2020 of sexually assaulting her in a Capitol office building in 1993. In a statement following the granting of her citizenship, Reade expressed her gratitude to "many heroes along the way with my story," and personally to RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan. Reade is not the first foreign public figure to be granted Russian citizenship by presidential decree. After his passport was cancelled by the US State Department under President Barack Obama, Snowden sought and was granted asylum in Russia, and later Russian citizenship.