“Verbatim Plagiarism”: Kamala Harris Caught Plagiarizing 2009 Book

In the recent past, this blatant theft would be out an end to any campaign.Back in 1988, Biden was shown to have plagiarized multiple other politicians – a scandal so devastating that he was forced to drop out of the race.

Now the Democrat media axis won’t even cover unless it is to attack the reporter who broke the story.

https://twiter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1845847428207145110

The media did the right thing in 1988 when they hammered Joe Biden for plagiarism.

The media should do the exact same thing today, but we know there are only a few honest reporters who will. pic.twitter.com/OpO8BmJU8V

— Brent Bozell (@BrentBozell) October 14, 2024

MORE PLAGIARISM: This is a seventh instance of significant plagiarism by Kamala Harris. She copied the language verbatim from a California government website, substituting a single word, rather than paraphrasing it or putting it in quotations. We can keep this going for a while. pic.twitter.com/yHONocMSBh

— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) October 15, 2024

Fox News: Vice President Harris is being accused of plagiarizing from several sources in her 2009 book on policing that was released while she was district attorney of San Francisco. The book, “Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer,” was co-authored with Joan O’C Hamilton. The so-called “plagiarism hunter,” Austrian professor Stefan Weber, found 27 times that Harris, the 2024 Democrat nominee for president, and her co-author allegedly committed some form of plagiarism. He found that “24 fragments are plagiarism from other authors, and 3 fragments are self-plagiarism from a work written with a co-author” (Fox News).

JUST IN: Kamala Harris accused of plagiarizing entire sections of her Smart on Crime book in an exclusive report by @realchrisrufo.

The book was published in 2009 and features entire sections that were copied from sources including Wikipedia.

“The investigation was conducted… https://t.co/LBMGDXvxwQ pic.twitter.com/NuDCvp7fU9

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) October 14, 2024

Somebody hang this in the Louvre. The New York Times claims that I “seize[d] on” Kamala Harris’s serial plagiarism. Admits later in the story that it is, in fact, plagiarism. And then calls noticing that fact “racist.” pic.twitter.com/igfEpwP1h7

— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) October 14, 2024

Chris Rufo: Somebody hang this in the Louvre. The New York Times claims that I “seized on” Kamala Harris’s serial plagiarism. Admits later in the story that it is, in fact, plagiarism. And then calls noticing that fact “racist” (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

— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) October 14, 2024

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

— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) October 14, 2024

Publisher of Kamala Harris’ Book Doing Damage Control Over Plagiarism Accusations

New York Post: The publisher of Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2009 book on criminal justice reform is redirecting “very sensitive” inquiries about apparently plagiarized passages to the highest levels, according to the conservative activist who revealed the copying. Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo — who first unveiled the plagiarism allegations on Monday — posted screenshots of leaked internal emails ordering publicity reps at Chronicle Books not to immediately respond to press inquiries about “Smart on Crime” (New York Post).

Chris Rufo: SHE KEEPS GOING: This is a ninth instance of significant plagiarism by Kamala Harris. Although she cited the source, she copied long passages of language verbatim, without paraphrasing or putting it in quotations. It’s textbook “verbatim plagiarism”—and not an isolated incident (X).

 

Kamala Harris’s Plagiarism Problem The vice president appears to have airlifted sections of her book, Smart on Crime.

By: Christopher F. Rufo, Oct 14, 2024

Kamala Harris has become famous, in part, for her unique rhetorical style. She switches freely between various accents and peppers her speeches with catchphrases: pondering falling “out of a coconut tree,” discussing “the significance of the passage of time,” and moving the nation toward “what can be, unburdened by what has been.”

To her supporters, the vice president’s rhetorical flourishes represent the values of compassion and optimism. To her detractors, her reliance on platitudes and tautologies demonstrates her unfitness for the presidency.

But, as we have discovered in this exclusive report, another element appears to exist within Kamala Harris’s rhetorical universe: plagiarism.

At the beginning of Harris’s political career, in the run-up to her campaign to serve as California’s attorney general, she and co-author Joan O’C Hamilton published a small volume, entitled Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. The book helped to establish her credibility on criminal-justice issues.

However, according to Stefan Weber, a famed Austrian “plagiarism hunter” who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world, Harris’s book contains more than a dozen “vicious plagiarism fragments.” Some of the passages he highlighted appear to 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. (Harris did not respond to a request for comment.)

Let’s consider a selection of these excerpts from Harris’s book, beginning with one in which Harris discusses high school graduation rates. Here, she lifted verbatim language from an uncited NBC News report, with the duplicated material marked in italics:

In Detroit’s public schools, only 25 percent of the students who enrolled in grade nine graduated from high school, while 30.5 percent graduated in Indianapolis public schools and 34 percent received diplomas in the Cleveland Municipal City School District. Overall, about 70 percent of the U.S. students graduate from public and private schools on time with a regular diploma, and about 1.2 million students drop out annually. Only about half of the students served by public school systems in the nation’s largest cities receive diplomas.

There’s more. 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 excerpt, with the airlifted material in italics and abbreviations, such as percentages and state names, treated as verbatim substitutions:

High Point had its first face-to-face meeting with drug dealers, from the city’s West End neighborhood, on May 18, 2004. The drug market shut down immediately and permanently, with a sustained 35 percent reduction in violent crime. High Point repeated the strategy in three additional markets over the next three years. There is virtually no remaining public drug dealing in the city, and serious crime has fallen 20 percent citywide.

The High Point Strategy has since been implemented in Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and Raleigh, North Carolina; in Providence, Rhode Island; and in Rockford, Illinois. The U.S. Department of Justice is launching a national program to replicate the strategy in ten additional cities.

In a section about a New York court program, Harris stole long passages directly from Wikipedia—long considered an unreliable source. She not only assumes the online encyclopedia’s accuracy, but copies its language nearly verbatim, without citing the source. Here is Harris’s language, with duplicated material in italics, based on the page as it appeared in December 2008, before she published the book:

The Mid-town [sic] Community Court was established as a collaboration between the New York State Unified Court System and the Center for Court Innovation. The court works in partnership with local residents, businesses, and social service agencies to organize community service projects and provide on-site social services, including drug treatment, mental health counseling, and job training. What was innovative about Midtown Court was that it required low-level offenders to pay back the neighborhood through community service, while at the same time it offered them help with problems that often underlie criminal behavior.

To make matters worse, in duplicating Wikipedia’s language, Harris seems to have missed critical information and misstated a relevant detail. She claims, in prose identical to the online encyclopedia’s, that “illegal vending was down 24 percent” as a result of the court’s policies. Early in the paragraph, Harris cites the Bureau of Justice Assistance report to substantiate the figure. But she made a mistake: On Wikipedia, the “24 percent” figure was apparently tied to a different report, which found that “arrests for unlicensed vending,” rather than unlicensed vending as such, “fell by 24 percent” (emphasis mine). Her reliance on Wikipedia, an unreliable source, led to an unreliable conclusion.

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