Vice President Kamala Harris plagiarized parts of her 2009 book “Smart on Crime,” according to a conservative activist.
“Kamala Harris plagiarized at least a dozen sections of her criminal-justice book, Smart on Crime, according to a new investigation. The current vice president even lifted material from Wikipedia. We have the receipts,” Christopher Rufo posted on X.
Rufo posted five examples as well.
According to Rufo, the alleged plagiarism is “comparable in severity to the plagiarism found in former Harvard president Claudine Gay’s doctoral thesis.”
That led Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio to fire off a post on X.
“Hi, I’m JD Vance. I wrote my own book, unlike Kamala Harris, who copied hers from Wikipedia,” he wrote.
Harris wrote the book “Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer,” while preparing to run for attorney general of California, Rufo wrote on his website.
The book is co-authored by writer Joan O’C Hamilton.
Rufo said that Stefan Weber, “a famed Austrian ‘plagiarism hunter’ who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world,” found that “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,” Rufo wrote.
The sources Rufo cites as plagiarized include an Associated Press news report, a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release, a Wikipedia article, a Bureau of Justice Assistance report and an Urban Institute report from 2004.
“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,” Rufo wrote.
Rufo said that in the process, “Harris seems to have missed critical information and misstated a relevant detail,” adding that “Her reliance on Wikipedia, an unreliable source, led to an unreliable conclusion.”
In sum, Rufo wrote, “ 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,” he wrote.
Seeking to head off one excuse, Rufo wrote, “ 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.”
“On that point, one might recall the title of her book: ‘Smart on Crime’ There is nothing smart about plagiarism, which is the equivalent of an academic crime. The publisher, as well as the sitting vice president, should retract the plagiarized passages and issue a correction. There should be a single standard—and Kamala Harris is falling short.” Rufo wrote.
In 1987, plagiarism was such a big deal that President Joe Biden abandoned his presidential hopes for the 1988 race over such a scandal.
According to The New York Times, Biden admitted to plagiarizing a law review article during his first year of law school.
Before quitting the race, Biden also took phrases wholesale from a British politician during a debate, according to The Washington Post.
