During the vice-presidential debate, Mike Pence called out Joe Biden for plagiarism scandals from the former vice president’s past when arguing that the Democratic nominee’s coronavirus plan looked very similar to President Trump’s.
“When you read the Biden plan it reads a lot like what Trump and I have been doing every step of the way,” Pence said to his debate opponent, Senator Kamala Harris, noting the use of advanced testing and building up personal protective equipment. “It looks a little bit like plagiarism, something Joe Biden knows a little bit about.”
While running for president in 1987, Biden held an event at the Iowa State Fair and used entire portions of a speech from a British politician as his own.
The New York Times reported on the fiasco saying Biden “lifted Mr. Kinnock’s closing speech with phrases, gestures, and lyrical Welsh syntax intact for his own closing speech at a debate at the Iowa State Fair on Aug. 23 – without crediting Mr. Kinnock.”
Biden mimicked Kinnock’s actions during the opening part of the address when he said he was the first “in a thousand generations” from his family to go to college, then gestured to his wife and said the same about her. Biden later admitted he had family members who did attend college before him.
Biden’s staffers remained defensive about the allegations of plagiarism but the damage was done and the candidate dropped out of the race by the end of that month.
Later the same year, Biden admitted to plagiarizing a law review journal for a paper while attending Syracuse University.
A law school faculty report confirmed that Biden had “used five pages from a published law review article without quotation or attribution” for his fifteen-page paper.
Biden claimed to have made a mistake in the citation process and asked school administrators not to expel him. He wrote at the time, “My intent was not to deceive anyone. For if it were, I would not have been so blatant.”
In an effort to assert his sincerity, Biden released a 65-page file about his time at Syracuse. However, that might have been a mistake because it contained records of poor grades, mixed evaluations from instructors, and details of the plagiarism.
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