Joe Biden Accused of Plagiarism, Again
00:39 GMT 10.06.2024 (Updated: 04:52 GMT 10.06.2024)
© AFP 2023 / BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI
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In 1965, current US President Joe Biden had his first documented case of being caught plagiarizing work after he admitted to lifting five full pages from a law review article without citation while in law school.
US President Joe Biden is being accused of lifting words from former US President Ronald Reagan while giving a speech commemorating the 80th anniversary of the D-Day invasion in Normandy.
First noticed by radio host Clay Travis, Biden appears to have borrowed several phrases from Reagan’s speech, which took place at the same location to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the D-Day invasion.
Joe Biden essentially plagiarized Ronald Reagan’s famous 1984 speech at Pointe du Hoc today in Normandy. Watch these clips side by side. Wow: pic.twitter.com/jeGgTS2Nnm
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) June 7, 2024
“At last the hour had come. Dawn. Sixth of June, 1944” Biden said in his speech. “At dawn on the morning of the Sixth of June, 1944,” Reagan said 40 years earlier.
Biden continued, “Two hundred and twenty-five American Rangers arrived by ship, jumped into the waves and stormed the beach.”
“Two hundred and twenty-five Rangers jumped off the British landing craft and ran to the bottom of these cliffs,” Reagan said in his version.
“They launched their ladders, their ropes, and grappling hooks, and they began to climb. When the Nazis cut their ladders, the Rangers used the ropes, and the Nazis cut the ropes, the Rangers used their hands,” Biden said in his version of the speech. “They shot rope ladders over the face of these cliffs and began to pull themselves up. When one Ranger fell, another would take his place. When one rope was cut, a Ranger would grab another and begin his climb again,” Reagan recounted in his.
Biden has made a habit of invoking Reagan during his presidency, a decision that has been described by insiders as trying to appeal to Republicans who distrust Trump. He dubbed his economic plan “Bidenomics” a play on the popular term Reaganomics. He has also evoked Reagan during speeches, unfavorably comparing former President Donald Trump to the Republican icon.
But there is a difference between invoking and plagiarizing, something Biden appears to come dangerously close to in his speech. While no sentence is copied word for word, the sentences are remarkably similar in both themes and content. The sentences also come in the same order. First Biden talks about the dawn of June 6, then he talks about the Rangers arriving by a ship and storming the beach and then the experience of climbing the cliffs using rope ladders, the same as Reagan.
Of course, similarities are expected when two people recount the same historic event, but in this case, the mirroring seems too complete to be mere happenstance. Hundreds of writers have described the Invasion of Normandy and it is unlikely any two of them would share as many parallels as the two Presidents’ speeches.
It was also reported in Politico days before his speech that Biden was planning on invoking Reagan and hoped for a similar reaction to his speech.
“Biden aides are open about their desire for a rerun and inviting comparisons to ‘The Gipper,’ [a nickname for Reagan] with aides conceding that they have studied the Reagan trip closely and are looking to similarly capture the attention of a distracted, disillusioned public and remind them of how much is still at stake.”
The problem is that Biden may have echoed Reagan too closely. In 2023, an editor for the Harvard Journal said that his first assignment in 2000 was editing an article by then-Senator Biden, which he found full of plagiarism. He said that he told higher-ups at the outlet and recommended they don’t run the piece, but they instead fixed the quotes and citations and published the piece.
That editor, Roger Severino, accused Biden of “mosaic plagiarism” which he described as replacing or moving a few words to make it harder to detect, a practice not too dissimilar from what Biden appeared to do in parts of his Normandy speech.
“This indicates what’s known in law as ‘consciousness of guilt,” Severino said of the article he edited.
The White House has denied Severino’s claims. But it was only a recent mark in a string of plagiarism accusations that have haunted Biden throughout his political career.
In 1987, Biden’s 1988 Presidential campaign was derailed when it was revealed that he lifted large parts of speeches from the then-leader of the UK Labour Party, Neil Kinnock. In that case, Biden stole not only lines from Kinnock but his life story as well. Biden falsely claimed that he and his wife were the first in their families to go to college, a claim that was true for Kinnock but not for Biden. He also claimed to come from a family of Pennsylvania coal miners, but he had not. Kinnock had come from a family of Welsh coal miners.
“Did they lack talent? Those people who could sing and recite and write poetry? Those people who could make wonderful and beautiful things with their hands? Those people who could dream dreams and see visions? Why didn’t they get it? Was it because they were weak? Those people who could work eight hours underground and then come up and play football? Weak?” Kinnock said in his speech.
“Those same people who read poetry and wrote poetry and taught me how to sing verse? Is it because they didn’t work hard? My ancestors who worked in the coal mines of Northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours?” Biden said in his.
Biden’s father sold cars for a living and his campaign at the time could only point to a great-grandfather who worked as a mining engineer, hardly someone who slaved underground for “12 hours.”
27 December 2023, 23:53 GMT
That wasn’t enough to push Biden out of the 1988 race however, he continued to defend himself in the media until it was revealed that he also plagiarized former President John F Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Democratic Senator Hubert Humphrey in his speeches. Biden blamed some of those instances on his staff, and in others argued that political speeches aren’t copyrighted, which is not true.
Then revelations that he was accused of plagiarism in law school came to light. The young Biden had copied five whole pages from a Law Review article without citation. He admitted wrongdoing in a letter to faculty and begged them not to label him a “cheat.” They decided to give him an F in the class but allowed him to retake it.
It was also revealed during that time that Biden had lied about his academic record, telling a voter that he received a full scholarship and graduated in the top half of his class when he actually received a partial needs-based scholarship and graduated near the bottom of his class.
His transcript, released by the campaign in an effort to show transparency after his academic exaggerations came to light revealed that Biden had received mostly Cs and Ds, with three exceptions: an A in physical education, a B in “Great English Writers” and an F in ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps).
During that same campaign, he also admitted that he lied about being a civil rights activist. “'I was not an activist,” Biden admitted. “I worked at an all-black swimming pool in the east side of Wilmington, Del. I was involved in what they were thinking, what they were feeling. But I was not out marching. I was not down in Selma. I was not anywhere else. I was a suburbanite kid who got a dose of exposure to what was happening to black Americans.”
Biden previously said that he “participated in sit-ins to desegregate restaurants and movie houses.”
In 2020, Biden revived his claim of being a civil rights leader, recounting on at least three occasions that he was arrested in South Africa, along with the United States’ UN ambassador, while trying to visit the imprisoned Nelson Mandela.
Biden would later admit that he was never arrested in South Africa.
In 2019 during the 2020 Presidential primaries, the Biden campaign was caught taking entire sentences word for word from outside organizations for his campaign’s website. As he did with the Kennedy speeches more than 30 years earlier, Biden blamed his staff for the mix-up.
The White House has not commented publicly on the similarities between Biden’s D-Day anniversary speech and Reagan’s.
