Vice President Kamala Harris plagiarized material in addition to her book Smart on Crime, an analysis by Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium found Tuesday.
The additional allegations of plagiarism diminish the credibility of the Harris campaign’s denial of plagiarism.
The Beacon’s Sibarium reported Harris also plagiarized pages of congressional testimony from a Republican colleague and a fictionalized story about human trafficking.
Sibarium reported on Harris’s material from congressional testimony:
Virtually her entire testimony about the bill was taken from that of another district attorney, Paul Logli of Winnebago County, Illinois, who had testified in support of the legislation two months earlier before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Both statements cite the same surveys, use the same language, and make the same points in the same order, with a paragraph added here or there. They even contain the same typos, such as missing punctuation or mistaken plurals. One error — a “who” that should have been a “whom” — was corrected in Harris’s transposition.
…
Harris, who also testified about two other bills that day, devoted approximately 1,500 words to the John R. Justice Act. Nearly 1,200 of them—or 80 percent—were copied verbatim from the statement Logli submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee on February 27, 2007, two months before Harris delivered her testimony.
Sibarium reported on Harris’s material apparently lifted from a fictionalized story about a victim of sex trafficking:
The story came from Polaris Project, a nonprofit that runs the National Human Trafficking Hotline. By June 2012, the project had posted a series of vignettes on its website that were “representative of the types of calls” the hotline receives and “meant for informational purposes only,” according to an archived webpage. To preserve confidentiality, the project said, key details like “names, locations, and other identifying information” had been changed.
Last week, New York Times’ plagiarism consultant Jonathan Bailey admitted Harris’s “plagiarism scandal” is far “more serious” than previously stated.
Citing the review of “a full dossier with additional allegations, which led some to accuse the New York Times of withholding that information from me,” Bailey backtracked on his original assessment in a Plagiarism Today article:
With this new information, while I believe the case is more serious than I commented to the New York Times, the overarching points remain. While there are problems with this work, the pattern points to sloppy writing habits, not a malicious intent to defraud.|
Is it problematic? Yes. But it’s also not the wholesale fraud that many have claimed it to be. It sits somewhere between what the two sides want it to be.
The 40-page document contains approximately 29 accusations (depending on how you count them). Eighteen of the allegations focus on the book, and another 11 focus on alleged self-plagiarisms that came later.
Conservative journalist Christopher Rufo exposed the plagiarism based on research by Dr. Stefan Weber, a respected Austrian expert on plagiarism.
Harris has not yet been asked about the allegations of plagiarism.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
