While serving as vice president to former US President Barack Obama, Joe Biden told his son Hunter that Obama had “no grace” after the future first-son suggested Obama borrowed elements of a speech from the elder Biden’s time on the campaign trail, according to emails from Hunter’s infamous laptop.
The email, dated September 7, 2010, was sent to Joe Biden’s personal email account the day after Obama gave a speech during a pro-union festival in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
“Interesting language from the President: ‘They (his grandparent) would tell me about seeing their fathers or uncles losing their jobs...how it wasn't just a loss of a paycheck that stung. It was the blow to their dignity, their sense of self worth,’” the email reads.
Hunter then asks: “Wonder where he got that from? Im surprised he didn’t finish with the long walk up a short flight of stairs. Pretty amazing.”
“No grace,” the elder Biden responds.
Hunter appears to be referring to speeches Biden gave during the 2008 campaign when he repeatedly mentioned the struggles families face through unemployment.
“A job is about dignity, about respect, about how you're able to view yourself. You know, when a job is lost or a house is foreclosed on, it's not just an economic loss, it's emotionally devastating for a family,” Biden said during a speech in Missouri in 2008. “It's about a parent having to make that long walk up a short flight of stairs, like my dad did when I was 10 years old, and walk into the child's bedroom and say, 'honey, I'm sorry -- I'm sorry but Daddy lost his job or Mommy lost her job.'”
The accusation by Hunter that Obama plagiarized his father is particularly ironic since the elder Biden has been caught blatantly plagiarizing multiple times.
Biden's 1988 presidential campaign ended in disaster after it was revealed he lifted his closing remarks of a debate from a British Labour Party politician. Multiple other instances of plagiarism during that campaign surfaced before he dropped out of the race.
Biden also admitted at that time that he was accused of plagiarism in law school. The dean said in that case Biden had used “five pages of a published law review article without quotation or citation.”
More than three decades after that ill-fated campaign, the Biden 2020 presidential campaign was forced to admit it used phrases lifted directly from nonprofit publications without attribution in the campaign’s climate and education platforms.
The White House, Obama’s office and Hunter Biden’s lawyers reportedly did not respond to requests for comments from US media.