A new report accuses Vice President Kamala Harris of appearing to plagiarize multiple sources in the book she co-authored in 2009 while she was San Fransisco’s district attorney.
Prior to Harris’ campaign for California attorney general, the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee published “Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer” alongside her co-author, Joan O’C Hamilton, according to Fox News.
Austrian professor Stefan Weber, known as the “Plagiarism Hunter,” released a blog on Monday with multiple excerpts from Harris’ 2009 book as evidence of the vice president’s alleged plagiarism of other sources. Weber’s blog post included one passage that appears to have been plagiarized from a 2008 Wikipedia article.
According to Weber, Harris and Hamilton appeared to have plagiarized 27 different times in the 2009 book. He wrote, “24 fragments are plagiarism from other authors, [and] 3 fragments are self-plagiarism from a work written with a co-author.”
In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Chris Rufo, a conservative activist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, said that a “new investigation” revealed that Harris had plagiarized “at least a dozen sections” of her book. Rufo also shared multiple examples of Harris’ alleged plagiarism on social media.
READ MORE: Viral Video: Top Democrat appears to mock Catholics in disturbing Harris campaign video
Rufo explained that the examples of plagiarism discovered in Harris’ book were “comparable in severity to the plagiarism found in former Harvard president Claudine Gay’s doctoral thesis.” The Daily Wire reported that the former Harvard president resigned last January after being accused of significant plagiarism.
Addressing the level of plagiarism identified in Harris’ book, Rufo said, “Taken in total, 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.”
After independently verifying the allegations of Harris’ plagiarism, Fox News reported that the vice president’s book contained both verbatim and near-verbatim copies of a Wikipedia page, a 2008 NBC News report, a Bureau of Justice Assistance report, and a press release from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
In response to the vice president’s alleged plagiarism, Rufo called for Harris to retract the plagiarized portions of her book and should release a correction. “The publisher, as well as the sitting vice president, should retract the plagiarized passages and issue a correction,” he said. “There should be a single standard—and Kamala Harris is falling short.”
