CNN's Alisyn Camerota defended Joe Biden's plagiarism on Wednesday after fellow anchor John Berman suggested Democrats will use Trump to excuse any of their own gaffes.
"I mean not only that, don't you go to the experts, to the experts' website, and lift some of their terminology?" Camerota asked, prompting a response from Bloomberg Businessweek's Joshua Green.
"No, no, you cite where you get your information from otherwise it's plagiarism. That's what got him into trouble in the first place," Green said.
"So it's the citations," Camerota responded, "I hear you."
Biden's climate platform included excerpts previously published by the Blue Green Alliance and the Carbon Capture Coalition without attribution. Biden's campaign called it an accident, stating it had "inadvertently left out" "several citations" from the final version and that they've since updated it. The former vice president is currently the frontrunner in the 2020 Democratic primary. Biden had his first presidential campaign derailed in 1988 after he gave speeches that copied remarks previously given by British Labor Party Leader Neil Kinnock.
"I will just say Chris Coons, who we had on in the first hour, had a really interesting defense to this though which is, 'come on, guys, this compared to the things that Democrats say the president is getting away with,' that might be something the Democrats use to offset any potential gaffes or problems that arise during the campaign," Berman said, referring to the Democrat senator from Connecticut.
The New York Times's Jonathan Martin added, "Two things, I think it's an unforced error that he should obviously not have made that is a distraction from his policy and secondly I think most Democratic primary voters aren't going to even be aware of it."