Seventeen times Biden lied, plagiarized, and exaggerated

High-profile plagiarism is back in the news as embattled Harvard University President Claudine Gay grapples with two cases that were shrugged off by the school’s presidential search committee.

Normally a firing offense in academic and political circles, there are times when culprits get away with a slap on the wrist. And that certainly is the case with Gay. Caught in the act, her Harvard bosses gave Gay a pass after she decided to make a few corrections in her published works and give proper credit.

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Maybe the best example of getting away with plagiarism is sitting in the Oval Office. While his earlier cases did trip him up, notably in 1987 when he was forced out of the presidential race for robbing words from a British politician, President Joe Biden has been involved in a dizzying and documented nine cases.

And that is on top of the eight oft-repeated biographical lies he tells in speeches, such as last weekend’s latest version of a made-up story about an Amtrak conductor congratulating Biden for flying over 1 million miles as vice president — after the conductor had died.

Below is a list of Biden’s biggest 17 lies, plagiarism, and exaggerations with hat tips to those who have documented each from the Washington Examiner, Des Moines Register, New York Times, Washington Post, Slate, New York Post, the Trump campaign, and others cited.

Plagiarisms:

1. Going all the way back to 1965, when he was a Syracuse University College of Law student, Biden lifted five pages of a law review for a legal report. “I was wrong, but I was not malevolent in any way,” he said when caught.
2. In 1987, he was forced out of the presidential race when he was caught stealing lines of British politician Neil Kinnock’s speeches. Maybe worse, he also mimicked some of Kinnock’s mannerisms in a style a reporter at the time called “creepy.” Political author Richard Ben Cramer said Biden knew what he was doing and even had a video of Kinnock to study.
3. Also during that presidential run, he stole lines from Robert F. Kennedy, according to a New York Times review. During his presidential run in 1968, RFK said, “It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. and it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.” Nearly 20 years later, Biden said, “That bottom line can tell us everything about our lives, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America, except that which makes us proud to be Americans.”
4. That year, he also borrowed from President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address when he fashioned a line off JFK’s famous phrase “Each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty.” According to the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd, Biden said, “Each generation of Americans has been summoned.”
5. Biden in 1987 also pulled a phrase from then-Sen. Hubert Humphrey. Wrote the New York Times’s Dowd, “At the Democratic National Convention in 1976, Mr. Humphrey, then a senator from Minnesota, declared: ‘The ultimate moral test of any government is the manner in which it treats three groups of its citizens: first, those who are in the dawn of life, our children; second, those who are in the shadows of life, our sick, our needy, our handicapped, and those, third, in the twilight of life, our elderly.’ Senator Biden’s version offered ‘a nation noble enough to treat those at the dawn of life with love, those at the dusk of life with care and those who live in the shadow of life with compassion.’”
6. In 2000, according to the New York Post, Biden was caught pulling lines from a federal judge’s opinion for an article in the Harvard Journal on Legislation about his Violence Against Women Act.
7. During his 2020 campaign, the Washington Post said Biden pulled policy platforms and wording from several groups, including a word-for-word proposal from the XQ Institute.
8. He also used whole sections of Bernie Sanders campaign plans in their joint unity task force paper, said the 2020 Trump campaign.
9. For his 2020 “Build Back Better” theme, Biden adopted the slogan from former President Bill Clinton’s “Building Back Better.”

Then there are Biden’s biographical tall tales, including:

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1. He said in 2008, a helicopter he was riding in was “forced down” near Osama bin Laden’s lair in Afghanistan. Actually, it was just waiting out a sandstorm, wrote former Washington Examiner reporter Alana Goodman, now with the Washington Free Beacon.
2. He has falsely claimed to be a coal miner and from a family of coal miners, a claim pulled from Kinnock, according to Slate.
3. In 2007, he said he was “shot at” while in Iraq. The truth is that he was in the green zone when a mortar landed several hundred yards away, reported the Hill.
4. Biden said in 1993 that he called Slobodan Milosevic a “damn war criminal” to his face during the siege of Sarajevo. Three out of four aides in the meeting wouldn’t corroborate.
5. Biden has said he was a civil rights leader, participating in sit-ins. Never happened.
6. Biden said he criticized former President George W. Bush in several long meetings. A Bush aide said he couldn’t remember Biden in any meetings and added that the former president “would never sit through two hours of Joe Biden.”
7. The president recently retold how his Delaware house caught fire, almost killing his wife, dog, and cat and melting his Corvette. Fox and the Associated Press reported that it was just a small kitchen fire.
8. And then there is his million miles flown story told to Amtrak conductor Angelo Negri. Biden claims that Negri congratulated him during a train trip to visit his dying mother. CNN tore that story apart, writing, “Biden’s story is false in two ways. First, he could not possibly have had this exchange with Negri: He did not reach the million-miles-flown mark as vice president until September 2015, according to his own past comments, but Negri had died more than a year earlier, in May 2014. Second, Biden’s mother was not dying at the time he reached the million-miles-flown mark. In fact, she had died more than five years prior.”