US Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris has been accused of multiple instances of plagiarism for a 2009 book on policing she co-authored while serving as the district attorney of San Francisco.
According to an investigation conducted by a self-described ‘plagiarism hunter,’ Austrian Stefan Weber, Harris lifted at least 24 fragments from other authors in the “Smart on Crime” book, which she wrote with Joan O’C Hamilton. Three other fragments were “self-plagiarism from a work written with a co-author,” according to the expert.
“What do these findings say about Kamala Harris? Is she in part fake? Did her ghostwriter plagiarize? Was it just the team behind her? I have no idea. I let other people from the US draw the right conclusions,” Weber wrote on his website detailing all the instances of alleged plagiarism in Harris’ book.
The allegations against Harris were also reported by conservative activist Chris Rufo. In a post on his website on Monday, he pointed to several passages from the Vice President’s book which appeared to be lifted word for word from other sources.
In several instances Harris seemed to have lifted entire sections from Wikipedia, while other passages featured near-verbatim reproductions of an NBC News report, a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release, and a report from the Bureau of Justice Assistance, among others.
“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 said.
The activist noted that while Harris may have relied on a ghostwriter to draft her book, she is ultimately responsible for the plagiarism contained within, as it has her name on the cover. Rufo called on Harris, as well as the publisher of the book, to retract the stolen passages and issue a correction.
“There should be a single standard – and Kamala Harris is falling short,” Rufo concluded.
While Harris has not personally commented on the allegations, her campaign has dismissed the claims, insisting that their candidate “clearly cited sources and statistics in footnotes and endnotes throughout” the book.