Long known for his rather complicated relationship with the truth, President Joe Biden has once again been accused not just of plagiarism but also of a crafty attempt to make the theft of words all the more difficult for readers to detect, as the New York Post reports.
The latest allegation comes from a Harvard Law School alumnus who has stepped forward to recount his experience as an editor at the school's Journal of Legislation back in 2000 when then-Sen. Biden submitted a piece rife with stolen ideas and phrases.
Roger Severino now works at the Heritage Foundation as its vice president of domestic policy but was a former editor of the aforementioned Harvard journal, and he recently leveled fresh claims of plagiarism against the president.
According to Severino, Biden offered for publication an essay discussing the Violence Against Women Act, a piece of legislation of which he was in support.
When reviewing the piece as part of his routine editorial duties, Severino's attention was grabbed by turns of phrase such as “herald of a new era,” which he said sounded eerily familiar.
Speaking to Fox News' Jesse Watters last week, Severino said that his reaction was, “Like, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa, I've heard this before.'”
It did not take Severino long to realize that Biden had wrongfully taken wording from a 1999 dissenting opinion penned by Judge Diana Gribbon Motz in the case of Brzonkala v. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and represented it as his own.
Severino said that he was “shocked” by the blatant nature of the plagiarism in Biden's piece.
“[Biden] had lifted language straight out of a [federal court] opinion, changed a couple of words and called them his own. There were no quote marks and no footnote or anything else attributing the court as the source,” Severino added.
Making matters worse in Severino's opinion, was the fact that Biden had utilized “mosaic plagiarism,” a technique in which an author will select a quote and simply change a few words here and there to make the theft “harder to detect” and something he believes shows “consciousness of guilt.”
Something that seems to irritate Severino to this day is the fact that even though he brought the issue to the attention of the journal's executive editor at the time in hopes that Biden's article would be rejected, nothing of the sort occurred.
Rather, the journal's staff “added quote marks and citations to fix the issue,” Severino remembered, adding that the editors “'fixed' the plagiarism by adding proper attributions and acted like the whole incident never happened.”
The Heritage Foundation executive remains outraged that even though Biden was “already known to have plagiarized before this article crossed my desk,” a likely reference to a well-known scandal from the politician's own law school days, he was “brazen enough to try it again.”
Though it may seem odd to some that Severino waited more than 20 years to go public with this information, he explained the move by saying, “The problem is he's been doing this for decades, and the American people have to know. He never owned up to his plagiarism scandals and his constant embellishments,” and unfortunately, mainstream media outlets seem determined to assist in the continued whitewashing of the president's dishonesty.
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