Kamala Harris’s Plagiarism Problem
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Kamala Harris has become famous, in part, for her unique rhetorical style. She switches freely between various accents and peppers her speeches with catchphrases: pondering falling “ out of a coconut tree,” discussing “the significance of the passage of time,” and moving the nation toward “ what can be, unburdened by what has been.”
To her supporters, the vice president’s rhetorical flourishes represent the values of compassion and optimism. To her detractors, her reliance on platitudes and tautologies demonstrates her unfitness for the presidency.
But, as we have discovered in this exclusive report, another element appears to exist within Kamala Harris’s rhetorical universe: plagiarism.
At the beginning of Harris’s political career, in the run-up to her campaign to serve as California’s attorney general, she and co-author Joan O’C Hamilton published a small volume, entitled Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer . The book helped to establish her credibility on criminal-justice issues.
However, according to Stefan Weber, a famed Austrian “ plagiarism hunter” who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world, 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. (Harris did not respond to a request for comment.)
Let’s consider a selection of these excerpts from Harris’s book, beginning with one in which Harris discusses high school graduation rates. Here, she lifted verbatim language from an uncited NBC News report , with the duplicated material marked in italics:
In Detroit’s public schools , only 25 percent of the students who enrolled in grade nine graduated from high school, while 30.5 percent graduated in Indianapolis public schools and 34 percent received diplomas in the Cleveland Municipal City School District. Overall, about 70 percent of the U.S. students graduate from public and private schools on time with a regular diploma , and about 1.2 million students drop out annually. Only about half of the students served by public school systems in the nation’s largest cities receive diplomas.
There’s more. In another section of the book, Harris, without proper attribution, reproduced extensive sections from a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release . She and her co-author passed off the language as their own, copying multiple paragraphs virtually verbatim. Here is the excerpt, with the airlifted material in italics and abbreviations, such as percentages and state names, treated as verbatim substitutions:
High Point had its first face-to-face meeting with drug dealers, from the city’s West End neighborhood, on May 18, 2004. The drug market shut down immediately and permanently, with a sustained 35 percent reduction in violent crime. High Point repeated the strategy in three additional markets over the next three years. There is virtually no remaining public drug dealing in the city, and serious crime has fallen 20 percent citywide.
The High Point S trategy has since been implemented in Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and Raleigh, North Carolina; in Providence, Rhode Island; and in Rockford, Illinois. The U.S. Department of Justice is launching a national program to replicate the strategy in ten additional cities.
In a section about a New York court program, 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. Here is Harris’s language, with duplicated material in italics, based on the page as it appeared in December 2008, before she published the book:
The Mid-town [sic] Community Court was established as a collaboration between the New York State Unified Court System and the Center for Court Innovation. The court works in partnership with local residents, businesses , and social service agencies to organize community service projects and provide on-site social services, including drug treatment, mental health counseling, and job training. What was innovative about Midtown Court was that it required low-level offenders to pay back the neighborhood through community service , while at the same time it offered them help with problems that often underlie criminal behavior.
To make matters worse, in duplicating Wikipedia’s language, Harris seems to have missed critical information and misstated a relevant detail. She claims, in prose identical to the online encyclopedia’s, that “illegal vending was down 24 percent” as a result of the court’s policies. Early in the paragraph, Harris cites the Bureau of Justice Assistance report to substantiate the figure. But she made a mistake: On Wikipedia, the “24 percent” figure was apparently tied to a different report , which found that “ arrests for unlicensed vending,” rather than unlicensed vending as such, “fell by 24 percent” (emphasis mine). Her reliance on Wikipedia, an unreliable source, led to an unreliable conclusion.
While the BJA report was not the proper source for the “24 percent” claim, it did appear in the Wikipedia entry’s list of citations, and apparently was a fruitful resource for Harris and her coauthor, as they reproduced substantial portions of its sentences. Here is the passage in Harris’s book, with duplicated material from the BJA report noted in italics:
Take West Palm Beach, Florida. This residential neighborhood on the outskirts of downtown struggl es with a high crime rate. Although West Palm Beach is less than one mile from Palm Beach, one of the most affluent cities in the country, more than a third of the town’s residents live in poverty , and unemployment is high. The community is full of deteriorated houses and businesses, vacant lots with discarded mattresses and piles of trash, and litter strewn throughout the streets, sidewalks, yards, and parks. At the time the community considered adding a court, no new business had opened in the area, and few new houses had been built in recent years .
Finally, when attempting to write a description of a nonprofit group, Harris simply lifted promotional language from an Urban Institute report , and failed to cite her source. Here is the current vice president, with the lifted language in italics:
Participants meet six days a week for twelve hours a day and take part in an intensive schedule that involves classes, group learning, and group counseling designed to help them take a hard look at the violence in their lives. When the men are released after serving their sentences, they continue a six-month substance-abuse program or continue in the Post Release Education Program. The men are also required to participate in community restoration activities to begin to make amends for the impact of violence on the community; RSVP conducts workshops and discussions at high schools and other public events to increase awareness about violent crime .
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. They not only lifted material from sources without proper attribution, but in at least one case, relied on a low-quality source, which potentially undermined the accuracy of their conclusion.
Of course, 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.
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I'm sure it won't matter to her supporters. They supported Biden after all. But not a good look.
well, you're right about one thing today
The idea that people should vote for Trump because of this story, true or false, is flat out disturbing.
The idea that any of these morons gives a shit about her failing to cite some statistics and figures from other studies to make her points as it seems is the case here is hilarious. Frankly, I'd be surprised to learn that the majority of Trump supporters have a reading comprehension level above 5th grade so their feigning to be offended at supposedly plagiarized content is disingenuous at best.
Trump is a monumental disaster and is dangerous for America, no amount of supposed plagiarism from Harris years ago would change that. Even if she had slapped her name on a completely ghost written book I'd still be voting for her over Trump.
funny how the supporters of a serial liar and fraud are so upset about this ...
They're not really, it's likely half or more of them don't even know what the word 'plagiarism' is and even fewer could spell it. They're just flinging anything and everything at the wall to see if it sticks because they're desperate. They know their candidate is a vile loser, but they can't give up now because they feel they must 'own the libs'. The 'Tiny Hands Dancer' is fucking losing it and they know it, so they have to feign outrage over every nothingburger, it's all they have left.
It is from the far right Claremont Institute and DeSantis stooge Christopher Rufo. What a surprise!
You imagine the MSM would do actual journalism?
No, I imagine that it is nearly impossible anymore to write original music now that everything ever created is recorded for all time
or write a 248-page book without "plagiarizing five short passages".
I ordered the book just so I could count the words and see how close this comes to actual voter fraud, another minute
problem that somehow fascinates the conservatives and purists among us.
That's complete bullshit.
nother minute problem
Right, stealing others work and profiting off it is perfectly acceptable.
and the book is co-authored?
How many people go to hell in that case?
or do we condemn both authors for two and a half plagiarized short passages?
but let's rush to judgement and commit character assassination........
because we got inuendo.
Good Fucking Grief.
Yes, she needed a ghost writer. Does that absolve her of responsibility?
because we got inuendo.
What innuendo? The writing was stolen. Let's not play dumb and pretend we don't know what plagiarism is. If a student does that he gets kicked out of his school.
but somehow lawyers and public officials can do it? That's your standard?
Remember when the left was making fun of trump for having a ghost writer, so is she just too fucking stupid to write her own book or is she a plagiarist?
So Wikipedia started in 2002 and the book was published in 2009 by multiple authors and screened by multiple
editors and you want to make a legal case out of the facts that Wikipedia,
an open forum that anyone can edit,
no longer matches exactly the citation numbers in the book or missing quotation marks 15 years later?
That's some case for confirmation bias, not much else.
Trump's ghostwriter, who worked with Trump very closely for many months, has repeatedly said that Trump is a narcissistic asshole who should not have power in government.
Lol. CAtch up in your playbook. . Even CNN admits she plagiarized other's works and as for your hail mary of a wikipedia claim, the professional plagiarism detector who discovered it used wikipedia pages from before the book publication date.
We are past the deny deny deny deny stage and now it's on to "who cares?"
When you can't dispute the information go after the source.
I dont have any interest in disputing the information. It is immaterial as to who should be president in an election between Harris and Trump.
I mention Rufo and the Claremont Institute because they are interested in bamboozling the public into believing this story is important. And so is the seeder of this article.
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I am not going to look at all into the accuracy of the allegation because it is immaterial to who should be president of the United States in 2025.
You really think I care? I stated my point and you backed it up.
Your point should have no bearing on the election.
Trump cant commit plagiarism because he hasnt written a sentence on his own in his life.
Everyone knows his book "The Art of the Deal" was completely ghost written.
Here's how the actual author of Trumps book feels about Trump:
“I put lipstick on a pig,” Tony Schwartz’ said “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.”
See if you can spot the difference in coverage by the New York Times...
The serial denier of plagiarism the Times brought out to defend Gay etc. is hard at work defending Harris.
So it turns out the ignorant bitch didn’t even have 1 original thought, she stole it from someone smarter, which could be literally anyone.
Except you?
It's clear that the book was co-authored, not clear that it wasn't ghost written.
But please jump right in based on rumor and inuendo.
So a plagiarist or too stupid to write her own book? How fucking worthless is the dem nominee?
How many books have you written?
Just asking for a friend...
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The excuse machine is working overtime on this one.
Maybe Harris stole a candy bar from Walgreens too.
Like this seed, that wouldnt matter in this election.
I agree John. That's the point of this seed. 40 years ago, Democrats ran Joe Biden out of the election for plagiarizing a speech.
Now, there's no crime, no act of dishonesty that Harris could commit that would keep Democrats from voting for her, so long as she doesn't commit political heresy.
It speaks volumes about her integrity. But then again, we already knew that was in the crapper. Which can play a part in this election.
Dont you just love the hypocrisy of the Democrats and the left.
Next you'll tell us that Harris plagiarizing a couple paragraphs is as bad as Trump being a pathological liar for 40 years.
It is bizarre.
Would that be any different from you ignoring Biden being a liar and blatant racist for the past 50 years.