OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
President Joe Biden has a history of plagiarizing — speeches, statements, and documents — and he’s facing a new, similar accusation from a Harvard Law School graduate.
“I was shocked by the plagiarism I discovered,” said Roger Severino, vice president at the Heritage Foundation, who is claiming that Biden lifted big portions of his work from an essay Biden wrote.
He said in a thread posted on the X platform last week that, while working at the Harvard Journal on Legislation as a junior editor in 2000, one of his earliest assignments was to reference check an essay penned by Biden. In doing so, he said he found several instances of plagiarism.
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
Severino claimed that Biden had “lifted language” from a Supreme Court opinion for an essay in which the then-U.S. senator defended the federal Violence Against Women Act while failing to provide sources or quotes, implying that the work was original.
“He had lifted language straight out of a [federal court] 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,” Severino said.
What happened next, however, was also an abomination, if not typical of the left-wing bias now prevalent in the country’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning.
Severino said that instead of “thanking me for protecting the integrity of the Journal,” his senior editors “covered for Biden” by inserting quote marks while adding the appropriate citations to make it look better.
“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 wrote.
President Biden has a history of embellishing, lying, and plagiarizing. Well, it turns out, there’s even more plagiarism than we thought.@RogerSeverino_ was a junior editor at the Harvard Journal when he told his editors he’d found more Biden plagiarism. They covered it up. pic.twitter.com/9hY7fA7QqI
— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) September 8, 2023
The Post Millennial added:
Severino said he believes that the 4th Circuit ruling in Brzonkala v. Virginia Polytechnic Institute was the court case that Biden failed to properly cite in the article, according to the Daily Mail.
The Harvard law school grad called Biden’s actions “brazen” considering the President’s past documented history of plagiarism.
“Biden was already known to have plagiarized before this article crossed my desk yet was brazen enough to try it again,” Severino noted further on X.
Throughout his career in politics, Biden has repeatedly plagiarized others’ work. Perhaps most famously, Biden was forced to drop out of the 1988 presidential race after he lifted portions of a speech by Neil Kinnock, the former leader of Britain’s Labor Party, without attribution and got caught.
Biden also has claimed he made a “mistake” in the 1960s when, as a law student at Syracuse Law School, he “unintentionally” lifted five pages from a law review for his own essay.
“I was wrong, but I was not malevolent in any way,” Biden stated, according to the UK’s Daily Mail. “I did not intentionally move to mislead anybody. And I didn’t. To this day, I didn’t.”
Late last week, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre made a startling admission during a press conference after Biden once again got something wrong in a statement.
Jean-Pierre was responding to a question from a reporter about a statement made by the president regarding the passing of former New Mexico governor and Clinton Energy Secretary Bill Richardson.
“The initial statement from the president about the passing of Governor Bill Richardson included condolences for his wife of 50 years, Barbara, and their daughter, Heather. That line about Heather, the daughter, has been removed because they didn’t have a daughter named Heather — or a daughter. So can you walk us through how these press releases are fact-checked; who signs off on them in the end; and then, in this case, how this error was made?” a reporter asked KJP.
“So, look, we apologize for the error,” Jean-Pierre began. “Certainly, that is not something that, you know, we want to do, right? We want to make sure that we get this information out clearly and in a straightforward way to the American people. So, that was not done intentionally. And certainly, when we realized that error, it was removed from the website.”
But what she said next was startling.
“We do have fact-checkers here. We do have multiple people who take a look at — at the press releases, especially from the president. This was just a miss, unfortunately. And we apologize for that miss,” she admitted.
