Vice President Kamala Harris plagiarized parts of her 2009 book “Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer.”
Yesterday, the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo published a summary titled “Kamala Harris’s Plagiarism Problem: The vice president appears to have airlifted sections of her book, Smart on Crime.” Rufo notes that “plagiarism hunter” Stefan Weber identified “more than a dozen ‘vicious plagiarism fragments’” in Harris’s 248-page book, which she co-authored with Joan Hamilton.
“Some of the passages” that Weber identified “contain minor transgressions—reproducing small sections of text; insufficient paraphrasing—but others seem to reflect more serious infractions, similar in severity to those found in Harvard president Claudine Gay’s doctoral thesis,” Rufo noted. (Gay was forced to resign from her position as Harvard’s president after it was discovered that most of her meager published work contained plagiarism. Gay committed “dozens” of acts of plagiarism, including “50 pretty clear-to-the-eye examples of plagiarism which would have gotten students kicked out.”)
Harris lifted “verbatim language from an uncited NBC News report”, copied “extensive sections from a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release” and copied long passages from a flawed Wikipedia page, examples of how “there is certainly a breach of standards here” by Kamala Harris, Rufo said.
“Harris and her co-author duplicated long passages nearly verbatim without proper citation and without quotation marks, which is the textbook definition of plagiarism,” he observed. “Of course, Harris, like many other public figures, may have relied entirely on a ghostwriter to draft her book. But that is not exculpatory: Harris, at the end of the day, put her name on the cover.”
