Roger Severino, a Harvard law graduate, accuses Joe Biden of plagiarism in a 2000 magazine article — claiming the language was taken directly from a court judgment, without attribution
- Conservative lawyer Roger Severino accused Biden of plagiarism in a 2000 article
- Severino said he discovered copycat passages in Biden’s submission while working as a junior editor at the Harvard Journal on Legislation
A Harvard Law School graduate has accused President Joe Biden of a previously unreported case of plagiarism related to a journal article he wrote in 2000.
Roger Severino, vice president at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, made the claims in a thread on X this week, and an interview with Fox News Thursday night.
Severino said that while he was in law school, he was working as a junior editor at the Harvard Journal on Legislation when he found multiple instances of plagiarism in an essay submitted by Biden in defense of the federal law on violence against women.
“I was appalled at the plagiarism I discovered,” Severino wrote on X. “He had taken the language straight from a (federal court) opinion, changed a few words, and called them his own. There were no quotes, no footnote, or anything citing the court as a source.”
Severino wrote that after discovering multiple instances of plagiarism, he took the matter to the editor-in-chief to recommend that the article be rejected — but instead says the editors “covered for Biden” and added quotes and quotes to solve the problem.
A Harvard Law School graduate has accused President Joe Biden of a previously unreported case of plagiarism related to a journal article he wrote in 2000.
Biden wrote an essay defending the Violence Against Women Act in the winter 2000 edition of the Harvard Journal on Legislation
“They ‘fixed’ the plagiarism by adding appropriate attributions and pretending the whole incident never happened. But this was not an innocent mistake, with Biden “forgetting” a few quotes, which would be bad enough,” he wrote.
Representatives from Harvard Law School and the Biden campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment from DailyMail.com late Thursday night.
Biden has been accused of plagiarism several times during his career, including during the 1988 Democratic presidential election when he liberally reused quotes from British politician Neil Kinnock in a debate.
As the story spread, Biden acknowledged that he had been accused of plagiarism while in law school, and a video emerged of him exaggerating his academic record during the campaign.
That scandal is widely held responsible for the failure of Biden’s first presidential bid. Michael Dukakis went on to win the Democratic nomination, losing to George W. Bush in the general.
Writing about the incident in the legal journal, Severino noted to X that “Biden was *already* known to have plagiarized before this article appeared on my desk, yet was bold enough to try again.”
Roger Severino, vice president at the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, made these claims this week in a thread on X and in an interview with Fox News
Based on Severino’s claims, the allegedly plagiarized passages appear to be from a dissenting opinion written by 4th Circuit Judge Diana Jane Gribbon Motz (above)
Severino said the court’s ruling that Biden did not correctly portray in the article was likely the 4th Circuit’s decision in Brzonkala v. Virginia Polytechnic Institute.
The published version of Biden’s article contains several quotes from the dissent in that case, written by Judge Diana Jane Gribbon Motz of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
Gribbon Motz, who is now semi-retired, was not immediately available for comment.
Severino’s accusation came days after the Washington Post published an article detailing an adjacent topic for Biden: his penchant for embellishing personal narratives beyond the bounds of credibility.
For his part, Kinnock, the liberal British politician Biden got rid of in 1987, seems to have forgiven the blunder as accidental and supported Biden’s 2020 presidential bid.
“Joe is an honest fellow,” Kinnock told the newspaper Guardian in 2020. “If Trump had done it, I would know he was lying.”