Vice President Kamala Harris allegedly plagiarized significant portions of her 2009 book on criminal justice, according to an investigation conducted by Austrian plagiarism expert Dr. Stefan Weber and confirmed by journalist Christopher Rufo.
“We independently confirmed multiple violations, which are comparable in severity to the plagiarism found in former Harvard president Claudine Gay’s doctoral thesis,” said Rufo in a thread on X.
The investigation was conducted by Dr. Stefan Weber, a famed Austrian “plagiarism hunter” who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world. We independently confirmed multiple violations, which are comparable in severity to the plagiarism found in former Harvard… pic.twitter.com/P9DTpZS4kV
Vice President Harris’s book Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer, co-authored with Joan Hamilton, contained over a dozen alleged instances of plagiarism, some minor and some severe.
The book released as Harris was preparing to run for Attorney General of California.
Rufo pointed to a 2008 NBC News report that Harris apparently copied from, changing only minor details without proper citation.
We can begin with a passage in which Harris discusses high school graduation rates. Here, she lifted verbatim language from an uncited AP/NBC News report: pic.twitter.com/pZv5mD3m5t
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 14, 2024
The book somewhat rearranged the information from the article and added a few extra words or phrases but kept a significant amount of verbatim text and did not substantially change the material.
In a seemingly more blatant example of plagiarism, a passage in Harris’s book almost exactly mirrored a passage in a press release from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
The only differences between Harris’ book and the press release were the single word “additionally” added by Harris, her use of the word “percent” instead of the percentage symbol, and her use of the full names of states rather than their postal abbreviations.
In another section of the book, Harris, without proper attribution, reproduced extensive sections from a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release. She and her co-author passed off the language as their own, copying multiple paragraphs virtually verbatim. Here is the… pic.twitter.com/9FpsxQE8Sz
Harris even copied two passages from Wikipedia, only changing “in order to” to “to” and changing “offering” to “it offered.”
“There is certainly a breach of standards here. Harris and her co-author duplicated long passages nearly verbatim without proper citation and without quotation marks, which is the textbook definition of plagiarism,” said Rufo in his report.
The new allegations surrounding Harris’s book mirror the plagiarism controversy that plagued former Harvard President Claudine Gay and ultimately forced her to resign.
Rufo produced evidence suggesting that Gay plagiarized major portions of her doctoral thesis.
Seamus Othot is a reporter for The Maine Wire. He grew up in New Hampshire, and graduated from The Thomas More College of Liberal Arts, where he was able to spend his time reading the great works of Western Civilization. He can be reached at [email protected]
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