A Harvard Law School alum has come forward to accuse President Biden of plagiarizing an article he wrote more than two decades ago.
Roger Severino claimed Thursday night he was working as a junior editor at the Harvard Journal of Legislation in 2000 when he found multiple instances of copying in an essay the then-Delaware senator wrote defending the Violence Against Women Act.
“Words like ‘herald of a new era’ tipped me off,” Severino told Fox News host Jesse Watters. “Like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, I’ve heard this before.’”
According to Severino, Biden failed to properly credit federal Judge Diana Gribbon Motz’s dissenting opinion in Brzonkala v. Virginia Polytechnic Institute.
In that case from 1999, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals invalidated part of the 1994 law as unconstitutional.
Roger Severino, vice president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, has come forward to accuse President Biden of plagiarism. Fox NewsThe published version of the essay contains several citations of Motz’s opinion, with Severino claiming they were inserted by the journal’s editors who “covered for Biden.”
Severino, who now serves as the vice president of domestic policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, wrote on X this week that “I was shocked by the plagiarism I discovered.
“[Biden] 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,” he claimed.
He claims a 2000 article Biden wrote as a senator “lifted language straight out of a [federal court] opinion.” Harvard UniversitySeverino went on to explain that the current commander-in-chief had engaged in “mosaic plagiarism,” in which a writer takes a quote and swaps out a few words “to make the plagiarism harder to detect.”
“This indicates what’s known in law as ‘consciousness of guilt,’” he said.
Severino said he flagged the issue to the executive editor of the journal and recommended he refuse to run Biden’s article.
Severino spoke about the incident on “Jesse Watters Primetime” Thursday night, explaining he came forward to make the American people aware the president “never owned up to his plagiarism scandals and his constant embellishments.” Fox NewsInstead, he claims, the editors “added quote marks and citations to fix the issue.”
“They ‘fixed’ the plagiarism by adding proper attributions, and acted like the whole incident never happened,” he tweeted.
“But this was no innocent mistake where Biden ‘forgot’ a quote mark or two, which would be bad enough,” Severino said, noting that the politician was “already known to have plagiarized before this article crossed my desk, yet was brazen enough to try it again.”
He had earlier explained what happened on X, the platform previously known as Twitter.
“I think they sanitized it and then they let it go,” Severino told Watters of his then-superiors. “They just quietly acted like it never happened.”
White House spokesperson Olivia Dalton told The Post on Friday that Severino’s claims were “demonstrably not true.”
“The final article has appropriate citations, and that fact is not in dispute,” Dalton said in an email. “So I’m not about to further dignify ridiculous attacks on the president from decades ago.”
The Harvard Journal of Legislation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
When asked why he decided to come forward with the claims 23 years after the fact, Severino said of Biden: “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.”
The president came under fire for plagiarism when he first ran for the White House in 1988. Getty ImagesThe president admitted in a 1965 letter to faculty at Syracuse University College of Law, his alma mater, that he made a “mistake” when he ripped off five pages from a published law review article without attribution.
“My intent was not to deceive anyone,” he wrote in the letter, which was resurfaced by the New York Times in 1987. “For if it were, I would not have been so blatant.”
Biden received an “F” for the paper, but was allowed to retake the course.
The plagiarism scandal helped sink Biden’s first presidential campaign, along with the revelation that he had lifted quotes from then-British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock — changing geographic details to falsely claim in speeches that “my ancestors … worked in the coal mines of Northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours.”
Unlike Kinnock, who was describing his own family in Wales, Biden’s ancestors did not mine coal.
Kinnock, now a member of the UK’s House of Lords, appears to have moved past the plagiarism, supporting Biden wholeheartedly in the 2020 presidential election.
“Joe’s an honest guy,” Kinnock told the Guardian at the time. “If [then-President Donald] Trump had done it, I would know he was lying.”






