Kamala Harris accused of plagiarizing in 2009 book about being 'smart on crime'
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."
Manhattan Institute senior fellow and conservative activist Chris Rufo first reported on the allegation on Monday, pointing to multiple examples from Harris' book in which entire sentences and phrases were apparently lifted from other sources without the use of quotations, though in some cases a footnote cites the source.
"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," Rufo wrote.
Fox News Digital independently verified that Harris' book features verbatim and near-verbatim reproductions from a 2008 NBC News report, a press release from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a Wikipedia page and a report from the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), among others.
A 2007 press release from John Jay reads:
Harris' book includes the following:
In another instance, a report published by BJA in 2000 says:
And Harris and her co-author wrote:
Harris is running against former President Trump, the Republican nominee. With the election less than a month away, many polls are showing the battle within the margin of error in critical swing states.
Harris' campaign and the White House did not provide comment to Fox News Digital in time for publication.
