A former editor of the Harvard Journal on Legislation has raised “shocking” allegations of plagiarism against President Joe Biden, claiming that he discovered instances of unattributed copying in an essay written by the then-Delaware senator more than two decades ago.
The accusations center around an essay defending the Violence Against Women Act, which Biden penned in 2000 during his tenure as a senator.
Roger Severino, who now serves as the vice president of domestic policy at The Heritage Foundation, took to social media to detail his findings, igniting a fresh controversy.
“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,” Severino posted on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.
Highlighting specific phrases that had raised his suspicions, Severino said in an interview with Fox News host Jesse Watters, “Words like ‘herald of a new era’ tipped me off. Like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, I’ve heard this before.’”
Severino’s accusations come on the heels of a broader examination of Biden’s veracity by Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post, who has scrutinized the president’s tendency to embellish facts.
Addressing this pattern, Severino stated, “He tends to embellish, and he tends to lie, and as your segment showed, he has decades of history doing this.”
The crux of Severino’s allegations centers on Biden’s purported failure to properly credit Federal Judge Diana Gribbon Motz’s dissenting opinion in the case of Brzonkala v. Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 1999, New York Post reported.
In that case, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals declared a portion of the 1994 law as unconstitutional.
Severino contended that the published version of Biden’s essay included several citations from Motz’s opinion, but the attributions were reportedly inserted by journal editors who, in Severino’s view, were covering for Biden.
Severino alleged, “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.”