Roger Severino, a Harvard Law School alumnus and current Vice President at the Heritage Foundation, has accused President Biden of plagiarizing an essay he penned in 2000.
"I was shocked by the plagiarism I discovered," Severino stated.
Severino's allegations surfaced in a recent thread on social media platform X, where he detailed his experience as a junior editor at the Harvard Journal on Legislation. His first assignment involved cite-checking an essay authored by Biden, during which he reportedly found multiple instances of plagiarism.
The alleged plagiarism pertains to Biden's essay defending the federal Violence Against Women Act. Severino claims that Biden "lifted language" from a Supreme Court opinion without providing appropriate sources or quotes, thereby implying the words were his own. "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 explained.
Severino further alleges that his editors at the Harvard Journal on Legislation covered for President Biden when he presented his findings. Instead of acknowledging his efforts to uphold the Journal's integrity, Severino says the editors "covered for Biden" by inserting quote marks and adding citations to rectify the issue. "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.
According to Severino, the court case that Biden failed to properly cite in his article was the 4th Circuit ruling in Brzonkala v. Virginia Polytechnic Institute, as reported by the Daily Mail.
Severino described Biden's actions as "brazen," particularly given the President's previous documented instances of plagiarism. "Biden was already known to have plagiarized before this article crossed my desk yet was brazen enough to try it again," Severino stated on X.
President Biden's political career has been marred by several accusations of plagiarism, involving both written and spoken language, according to the Daily Mail. Notably, during his first presidential campaign in the 1980s, Biden was accused of plagiarizing a speech from Neil Kinnock, the former leader of Britain's Labor Party. Biden's failure to attribute the lines to Kinnock resulted in the emergence of mashups of the two speeches.
Furthermore, Biden has admitted to making a "mistake" during his time as a law student at Syracuse Law School in the 1960s, when he "unintentionally" copied five pages from a published legal review. "I was wrong, but I was not malevolent in any way," Biden stated, according to the outlet. "I did not intentionally move to mislead anybody. And I didn't. To this day I didn't."
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