Biden’s troubling history of plagiarism

Posted on Jul 13, 2020

Joe Biden has a long history of stealing other politician’s and academics thoughts, words, even expressions and personal stories. Although he’s running his campaign on “authenticity” it’s clear, Biden is anything but. Here’s a look at his long and troubling record of lies, deceit and clear misrepresentation.

  1. Biden plagiarized a paper he submitted while a first-year law student in 1965. According to the Washington Post:

The record showed that in a meeting on Dec. 1, 1965, the law school faculty found that Biden had, “without quotation or citation,” lifted five pages from a published law review article and used them in his 15-page paper for a legal-methods course.

The faculty recommended that he receive an “F” for the course and be allowed to repeat it the following year. (Biden did repeat, receiving an 80). Law School Dean Ralph Kharas said in the memo that if Biden’s record was clear from that point on, he would state that the incident should not stand in his way to his being admitted to the bar.

  1. During a presidential debate at the Iowa Fair in 1987, Biden lifted passages and even gestures from a speech by Neil Kinnock without giving credit to the leader of the British Labour Party. As Slate reports:

Biden lifted Kinnock’s precise turns of phrase and his sequences of ideas—a degree of plagiarism that would qualify any student for failure, if not expulsion from school. But the even greater sin was to borrow biographical facts from Kinnock that, although true about Kinnock, didn’t apply to Biden. Unlike Kinnock, Biden wasn’t the first person in his family history to attend college, as he asserted; nor were his ancestors coal miners, as he claimed when he used Kinnock’s words. Once exposed, Biden’s campaign team managed to come up with a great-grandfather who had been a mining engineer, but he hardly fit the candidate’s description of one who “would come up [from the mines] after 12 hours and play football.” At any rate, Biden had delivered his offending remarks with an introduction that clearly implied he had come up with them himself and that they pertained to his own life.

  1. While on the campaign trail in 1987, Biden pulled word-for-word what other politicians had previously said on the stump. According to the New York Times:

In a speech to the California State Democratic Convention on Feb. 3, Mr. Biden said that ”each generation of Americans has been summoned” to a test of devotion to democracy; the same phrase was used about national loyalty by John F. Kennedy in his Presidential inaugural address in 1961.

Other times Mr. Biden uses longer passages nearly verbatim.

When Senator Kennedy was running for President in 1968, he talked in Des Moines and again at the University of Kansas about the measure of a nation.

”The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play,” Senator Kennedy said. ”It does not include the beauty of our poetry, or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.

”It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”

In the California convention speech, Senator Biden talked about ”the ultimate moral test of what this country is,” and denounced what he saw as society’s new materialism.

”We cannot measure the health of our children, the quality of their education, the joy of their play,” he said, after opening his speech by declaring that he wanted to tell the audience ”what is on my mind.”

”It doesn’t measure the beauty of our poetry, the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate, the integrity of our public officials.

”It counts neither our wit nor our wisdom, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country,” Mr. Biden continued, to applause. ”That bottom line can tell us everything about our lives except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America except that which makes us proud to be Americans.”

  1. During a campaign stop in 1987, Biden also said he finished in the top half of his law school class, whereas records showed he had graduated 76th in a law class school of 85. He went onto say he went to law school on a full scholarship, but school records again showed that was not true. The Associated Press reported at the time:

Sen. Joe Biden claimed during a campaign appearance in New Hampshire last spring that he finished in the top half of his law school class, although records indicate he finished near the bottom.

In a videotape aired by the public service cable network C-SPAN several months ago, the Delaware Democrat was asked at a campaign stop in Claremont, N.H., on April 3 about what law school he attended and how well he did.

On the videotape, a clearly angered Biden told the questioner: ″I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do.”

  1. Last summer, the Biden campaign admitted it had plagiarized its climate policy plan, pulling from non-profits and other groups, verbatim. As the Washington Post reported at the time:

“Biden’s campaign on Tuesday acknowledged that it had lifted phrases, without attribution, from various nonprofit publications in its climate and education plans.

In one instance, a sentence on carbon capture from Biden’s climate plan is nearly identical to wording used by a group called the Carbon Capture Coalition.

“Staff working on drafts of the policy paper inadvertently left some citations out of the final document, and Vice President Biden was unaware of it,” Biden campaign spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield said in a statement. “As soon as staff were made aware of the error, they fixed it.”

  1. Last week, the Biden campaign released its “Unity Platform” where it lifted word for word statements from Bernie Sanders’ campaign proposals. Biden’s criminal justice unity task force, workplace democracy plan, disability rights agenda, and social security agenda were all pulled verbatim from Sanders’ 2020 campaign.

 

  1. Biden’s “Buy American” focus of his campaign, which was unveiled last week, clearly pulls from President Trump’s “America First” economic proposals. As Politico reports:

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway claimed Biden’s “Buy American” focus was copied from Trump’s 2016 campaign.

“And now yesterday, for all to see, [Biden] was plagiarizing Donald Trump, ‘Buy American,’” Conway told reporters outside the White House. “He recognizes that ‘Buy American’ is very popular. I hope they didn’t spend a dollar on focus-grouping that since we already know it’s how this president got elected.”