Harvard Law grad accuses Biden of plagiarizing essay in 2000 using court opinion

A graduate of Harvard Law School has accused President Biden of plagiarizing an essay he had written in 2000, saying "I was shocked by the plagiarism I discovered."

Roger Severino, vice president at the Heritage Foundation, claimed that while he was working at the Harvard Journal on Legislation as a junior editor his first assignment was to cite check an essay written by Biden and found multiple instances of plagiarism, which Severino detailed in an explosive thread on X earlier this week.

Severino alleges that Biden had "lifted language" from a Supreme Court opinion for his essay defending the federal Violence Against Women Act, and failed to provide sources or quotes, thus implying it was written in his own words.

"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 said.

According to Severino, his editors reportedly covered for President Biden when he brought up his findings. The editors, instead of "thanking me for protecting the integrity of the Journal, they covered for Biden" and inserted quote marks and added citations to fix the issue, he said.

"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.

Severino said he believes that the 4th Circuit ruling in Brzonkala v. Virginia Polytechnic Institute was the court case that Biden failed to properly cite in the article, according to the Daily Mail.

The Harvard law school grad called Biden's actions "brazen" considering the President's past documented history of plagiarism.

"Biden was already known to have plagiarized before this article crossed my desk yet was brazen enough to try it again," Severino said on X.

Over the course of Biden's political career, he has been accused on many different occasions of publishing work that is not his own, which includes both written and spoken language, according to Daily Mail.

During his first presidential run in the 1980s, Biden notoriously ripped a speech from Neil Kinnock, the former leader of Britain's Labor Party. When an aide had told Biden that he had forgotten to source the lines from Kinnock, it was too late, and mashups of the two coinciding speeches began to surface.

Biden also has acknowledged making a "mistake" in the 1960s when, as a law student at Syracuse Law School, 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."