Surprisingly, CNN journalists on Thursday did what the networks have largely not been interested in: They looked at Joe Biden’s poor performance in presidential campaigns and his plagiarism problems.

CNN Politics Reporter Chris Cillizza dove into the 1988 scandal in which Biden appeared to directly lift from a British Labour politician named Neil Kinnock. Cillizza noted that the Democrat didn’t even make it into calendar year 1988 before being forced to drop out. He explained, “[Biden] gives a speech that is very similar to a speech that a British Labour politician named Neal Kinnock and it leads to his demise.”

Cillizza played footage of both speeches:

JOE BIDEN: I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university? NEIL KINNOCK (British lawmaker): Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?

Cillizza told viewers that there are other plagiarism issues for Biden. He didn’t go into details, but indeed there are more examples. The September 18, 1987 New York Times went through his problems in law school:

Biden had ''used five pages from a published law review article without quotation or attribution'' and that he ought to be failed in the legal methods course for which he had submitted the 15-page paper. The plagiarized article, ''Tortious Acts as a Basis for Jurisdiction in Products Liability Cases,'' was published in the Fordham Law Review of May 1965. Mr. Biden drew large chunks of heavy legal prose directly from it, including such sentences as: ''The trend of judicial opinion in various jurisdictions has been that the breach of an implied warranty of fitness is actionable without privity, because it is a tortious wrong upon which suit may be brought by a non-contracting party.'' In his paper, Mr. Biden included a single footnote to the Fordham Law Review article.

As for 2008, Cillizza summerized, “He only ran in one race. This is the Iowa Democratic caucus. It kicks off the nomination. Here he is down at one percent.”

In another surprise moment, someone on CNN agreed with the President. Cillizza concluded, “One thing Donald Trump is right about when he attacks Joe Biden... he’s never really shown the quality of candidate that we expected him to be in either of those races.”

In contrast, the networks have radically downplayed any potential problems for Biden’s latest launch. Since Tuesday night, ABC, CBS, and NBC devoted 26 minutes and 57 seconds to the Democrat. Of that, less than two minutes was on Biden’s unwanted touching of women.

On CBS This Morning, Thursday, Norah O’Donnell gushed over “Uncle Joe... regular Joe.”

A transcript of the CNN segment is below. Click “expand” to read more.