A new report has revealed that Joe Biden plagiarized passages of a law review article in 2000, when he was a senator.
Roger Severino, a vice president at the Heritage Foundation, revealed the story on X. He focused on how “brazen” Biden was since he had been caught plagiarizing before. Here is just part of his history in plagiarism: As a student at Syracuse Law School in 1965, Biden plagiarized five pages from a law review journal. In 1987, Biden dropped out of the presidential race after he was caught in his closing remarks at a Democratic primary debate plagiarizing a speech from Neil Kinnock, the former leader of Britain’s Labour Party.
“My first assignment as a junior editor at the Harvard Journal on Legislation (1999-2000) was to cite check an article submitted by one Sen. Joseph R. Biden. I was shocked by the plagiarism I discovered,” Severino wrote in a thread on X.
“Because I was interested in the article’s topic (civil rights) I read a bunch of the cited cases all the way through,” Severino continued. “That’s when I noticed that a certain turn of phrase in an opinion sounded oddly familiar even though it was my time reading it. So I turned back to Biden’s article, and there it was. He had lifted language straight out of a SCOTUS opinion, changed a couple words, and called them his own. There were no quote marks and no footnote or anything else attributing the court as the source.”
“I then read the piece through again and multiple other phrases sounded familiar. Turns out they too were plagiarized from opinions. I believe this merited rejecting the article outright for plagiarism so I emailed the lead editor and presented the indisputable proof,” he wrote. “Instead of thanking me for protecting the integrity of the Journal, they covered for Biden. They ‘fixed’ the plagiarism by adding proper attributions and acted like the whole incident never happened.”
“But this was no innocent mistake, where Biden ‘forgot’ a quote mark or two which would be bad enough,” Severino recalled. “Instead, he engaged in ‘mosaic plagiarism’ which entails taking a quote and swapping some words with synonyms to make the plagiarism harder to detect. This indicates what’s known in law as ‘consciousness of guilt.’”
“Worse still, Biden was *already* known to have plagiarized before this article crossed my desk yet was brazen enough to try it again,” Severino concluded.
The report also alleges that the Harvard Law Review knew about the plagiarism, but they chose to cover it up.
My first assignment as a junior editor at the Harvard Journal on Legislation (1999-2000) was to cite check an article submitted by one Sen. Joseph R. Biden. I was shocked by the plagiarism I discovered. 🧵 https://t.co/0CSqJBZR7E
— Roger Severino (@RogerSeverino_) September 4, 2023
