Report: Harris Accused Of Plagiarizing Co-Authored 2009 Book 'Smart On Crime'

 

Several paragraphs from Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s 2009 book “Smart on Crime” were found to closely resemble—or exactly match—wording from other sources, leading to accusations of plagiarism against the vice president.

Together with ghostwriter Joan O’C. Hamilton, who told the New York Post outlet when contacted on Monday that she was shocked to hear about the alleged copying, Harris, who was the district attorney of San Francisco at the time, penned the book advocating for a reform-minded approach to criminal prosecution.

Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist, released the claims on Monday and attributed them to research conducted by Austrian “plagiarism hunter” Stefan Weber. Rufo shared screenshots of five instances on X where the book’s wording closely mirrors other sources.

In all instances, the purported source material predated the vice president’s book publication date.

The five side-by-side excerpts suggest that Harris may have copied text from a 2008 Associated Press article, a 2008 draft of a Wikipedia article, a 2000 Bureau of Justice Assistance report, a 2004 Urban Institute report, and a 2007 award press release from John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

The original verbiage’s source is mentioned in footnotes in at least two of the cases; however, quote marks are not used around the words that seem to have been copied, and in other cases, like the Urban Institute study, passages seem to be completely uncredited.

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

“Kamala Harris fabricated a source reference, inventing a nonexistent page number. The self-promotional content from Goodwill Industries was copied verbatim without citing the source (Goodwill Industries was her ‘primary partner’ on in [sic] the ‘Back on Track’ program),” Weber claimed.

“In many other instances, even when a source was cited with a footnote, the text was directly copied and pasted without using quotation marks. Quotation marks would have been the most transparent and honest approach, also in non-academic books. Further signs of dishonesty may be evident when sources were copied but specific details were altered, such as replacing a Subway store owner with a sandwich shop clerk (p. 124) or highlighting Southeast Asia in the context of the US gang problem (p. 184).”

Nevertheless, politicians have survived similar scandals in the past. For example, former President Joe Biden misappropriated the family background and public statements of British politician Neil Kinnock during his 1987 presidential campaign and plagiarized a paper in his first year of law school.

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