It’s a history President Trump’s campaign is trying not to let the public forget: Joe Biden’s habit of lifting quotes or remarks from other politicians.
On Thursday, Trump’s staff sent out an email to the press detailing Biden’s “long record of plagiarism from his time in law school to his failed presidential campaigns.”
The email comes as the Trump campaign has been desperately trying to find new attacks that land on the former vice president in the midst of lopsided poll numbers that spell a landslide victory for Democrats this November.
In the email, the Trump campaign summarized Biden’s 1987 plagiarism controversies that were among the reasons he abandoned his first White House race. In that year, reports surfaced that Biden failed a law school course after not properly citing a law review article in a class paper.
“I was wrong, but I was not malevolent in any way,” Biden said at the time, admitting guilt. “I did not intentionally move to mislead anybody. And I didn’t. To this day, I didn’t.”
Biden’s plagiarism woes didn’t end that year. In August 1987, Biden was caught copying lines in a speech by British politician Neil Kinnock. He quickly dropped out of the race shortly after in what many considered to be one of the most embarrassing presidential runs in recent history.
Kinnock, a member of the House of Lords, went on to back Biden’s third White House bid last April, arguing Biden had the best chance of unseating Trump in the general election.
“If the Democratic Party chooses Joe, they’ll have someone who is certainly in with a decent chance,” Kinnock told the Washington Examiner. “That will be because of his proven ability, experience, sense of mature judgment on the major issues, his qualities as a communicator, and his normality. Not perfect, but with only mundane imperfections, which, I think, will have real appeal to the electorate.”
But the Trump campaign is trying to convince voters that Biden isn’t responsible for many of the ideas that come out of his mouth, even today. Shortly after Biden’s team announced the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force recommendations, the Trump campaign argued that Biden’s campaign was nothing more than a “Trojan Horse” for radical members of the Democratic Party.
“Biden again has proven he is too weak to stand up to the extremists in his party and is now running on their socialist agenda,” Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said in a statement.
And this week, as the Biden campaign announced its “Build Back Better” program to spur domestic manufacturing, the Trump campaign said that the “slogan is stolen both in name and idea.”
The Trump campaign claims the “slogan first originated in December 2006 when the United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Tsunami Recovery … issued a report titled ‘Key Propositions for Building Back Better.'”
A spokesman for Biden brushed away the accusations of plagiarism, dismissing the line from the Trump campaign as desperate.
“First, Donald Trump said Joe Biden was plagiarizing from his own plans, and now, Trump’s team laughably says Joe Biden is plagiarizing from the ‘radical Left,'” said Biden campaign deputy rapid response director Mike Gwin. “These are sad and flailing attacks from a president who failed us so thoroughly on COVID-19 — leaving over 135,000 Americans dead and almost 20 million jobless and now is running a listless, low-energy campaign ricocheting from one discredited smear to another in an unsuccessful search for a message.”
In June 2019, Biden was accused of copying language in his climate change proposal from left-wing environmental groups. That policy plan, which contained no citations, included funding for carbon capture and storage technology that has been championed by environmental groups such as the Blue Green Alliance.
