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Roger Severino: Harvard law graduate accuses Joe Biden of plagiarism in 2000 journal article

Roger Severino claims Joe Biden quoted text without proper citation in a Harvard Journal on Legislation submission

WASHINGTON, DC: Harvard Law School graduate Roger Severino, who was once tasked with checking a Joe Biden article from 2000, claims the President plagiarized multiple portions of the article without any citation.

Currently serving as a vice president at the Heritage Foundation, Severino described details in a thread in the social media site X (formerly known as Twitter). He also appeared for an interview with Fox on Thursday, September 7, where he made the claims regarding the President plagiarising an article.

Did Joe Biden plagiarize the 2000 article?

If Severino is to be believed, Biden quoted passages from legal journals without citing them correctly.

Severino started the thread by saying, "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."

Later, explaining what cite-checking is, Severino wrote, "Cite checking involves formatting case citations under highly prescribed rules and searching Westlaw to make sure the cases haven’t been overruled or superseded. Because I was interested in the article’s topic (civil rights) I read a bunch of the cited cases all the way through."

He claimed next, "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," Severino added.

Severino continued, "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. Instead of thanking me for protecting the integrity of the Journal, they covered for Biden," he alleged.

He also claimed, "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."

Adding that it was akin to "consciousness of guilt," he added, "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," said Severino.

Severino added a link to the 2000 article in the thread saying, "Here’s a link to the article from 2000, as published. Someone should definitely read through it and all the cited cases to see if there were any instances of mosaic plagiarism I may have missed."

'Biden has a long history of doing just that'

The revelation invited fresh criticism for Biden on social media.

One social media user said, "Dude, he dropped out of the Presidential race for plagiarism. You want to go further back and think people will now care?"

Another wrote, "He is essentially stealing someone else's intellectual property and passing it off as his own. We all have been aware of this. Obama still running the show?"

"Maybe Biden's constant plagiarism of speeches made by RFK & JFK is another part of the reason he won't debate @RobertKennedyJr. #BidenDebateKennedy," said someone else.

A user asked Severino, "Here’s the real question: Do you think Biden even wrote it in the first place? Or do you think he just assigned it to some intern?"

"This is the sign of true midwittery. Us lazy but actually bright people rephrase sentence by sentence. Swapping words out is not just lazy--it reveals intellectual incapacity," said another user.