What We Know About Plagiarism Allegations Against Harris (2024)

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The allegations originated with the findings of a "plagiarism hunter" based in Germany and a partisan news and opinion website in the U.S.

Jack Izzo

Published Oct. 26, 2024

What We Know About Plagiarism Allegations Against Harris (1)

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On Oct. 14, 2024, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo published an article on his Substack page alleging that U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee in the 2024 presidential election, had plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2009 book "Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer" from various sources, including Wikipedia.

Following the report's release, social media users, including former President Donald Trump's running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, spread the allegation online. From there, it was picked up by news outlets, including mainstream sources like The New York Times and CNN, but also right-leaning publications like the New York Post.

On Oct. 22, The Washington Free Beacon — another conservative outlet — added additional allegations, including that Harris plagiarized most of a written statement she prepared for Congress in 2007 while serving as the district attorney of San Francisco.

There are indeed similarities between some of the phrasing Harris used in "Smart on Crime" and the reports she allegedly plagiarized from. The 2007 statement to Congress, meanwhile, contained sentences also found in a statement prepared by Paul Logli, then the district attorney for Winnebago County, Illinois. Logli delivered his statement to Congress two months before Harris.

The Harris campaign has not replied to a request for comment on these allegations.

However, plagiarism expert Jonathan Bailey, who runs the site PlagiarismToday, wrote that while Harris' book had "problems," it wasn't "wholesale fraud" and attributable more to "sloppy writing habits" than intentional copying. Bailey noted that plagiarism is not just about taking someone else's ideas, but also whether there would have been an expectation that those ideas were original.

We summarize both instances of alleged plagiarism below:

'Smart on Crime'

According to Rufo's article, an Austrian communications professor named Stefan Weber uncovered the allegedly stolen passages in Harris' book. Weber is a prolific "plagiarism hunter" in the German-speaking world, and his accusations have led to a few German politicians retiring, according to The New York Times. Rufo wrote that Weber found "more than a dozen 'vicious plagiarism fragments'" of varying levels of seriousness.

Of the examples Rufo shared publicly, the most likely to cause concern was the allegation that Harris stole passages from Wikipedia, a crowd-sourced online encyclopedia long regarded as inconsistently reliable.

Compare the following paragraph from Chapter 19 of "Smart on Crime" with a paragraph from the Midtown Community Court's Wikipedia entry as it appeared in December 2008 (duplicated phrasings are in bold):

"The Mid-town 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."

* * *

"The Midtown 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 in order to organize community service projects and provide on-site social services, including drug treatment, mental health counseling, and job training. Unlike most conventional courts, the Midtown Court combines punishment and help, requiring low-level offenders to pay back the neighborhood through community service while at the same time offering them help with problems that often underlie criminal behavior."

The correspondences are absolutely there. Bailey wrote that it was indeed plagiarism. Weber and Rufo alleged that this copying led to an error in the very next paragraph, in which Harris attributed statistics from the Wikipedia page to an incorrect source.

Beyond the Wikipedia example, Weber and Rufo found examples in which Harris took statistics and passages from an Associated Press story, a news release from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a report from the Bureau of Justice Assistance and a report from the Urban Institute. Snopes reviewed all of the allegations Rufo singled out in his article and found that, at bare minimum, they showed sloppy citation habits. While the sources Harris took from were cited in all but one of these cases, the words she used were not properly attributed to their sources.

In his independent analysis of the allegations for Plagiarism Today, Bailey wrote that they warranted a thorough review of the book and a correction of the issues found, but not a "more drastic response" than that. He wondered what the collaborative process between Harris, her co-author Joan O'C. Hamilton and their publisher was like, but noted that a collaboration did not absolve Harris of the responsibility to cite her sources properly.

The Washington Free Beacon

The allegations from The Washington Free Beacon were significantly shakier, according to Bailey.

In a separate article for Plagiarism Today, Bailey emphasized that the deciding factor in this case wasn't whether Harris had copied from someone, but whether the words in question would have been expected to be original. Bailey emphasized the point by quoting a 2023 article from Above the Law, a news and opinion publication for the legal profession: "[E]xercising originality in word choice is often damn near malpractice."

In other words, using the same language to share the same message is common in both politics and in law, and favoring originality over consistency can do more harm than good in some cases. While there is absolutely room for debate about the ethics of that practice, according to Bailey it is "how the system works, for better or worse."

As an example, while the similarities between Paul Logli's and Harris' 2007 statements for Congress were striking, Logli himself said there was a very good reason for that: message consistency.

"The similar content of our statements was an effort by [the National District Attorneys Association] to be entirely consistent in the positions we presented to both Houses of Congress on behalf of the 3500 state and local prosecutors we represented on a national level," Logli told the Free Beacon.

At the time, Logli was the chairman of the National District Attorneys Association and Harris served on its board. He told WIFR-TV, an Illinois news station, that his statement was largely written by NDAA staffers and he believed Harris' statement was too.

"I don't think it's a case of plagiarism. I think it's two people appearing before separate committees of Congress with opening statements prepared by staff. And I think the reason for that is we wanted to have a consistent position," he said.

Allegations of Plagiarism Can Be a Slippery Slope

Bailey has previously called out what he calls "the weaponization of plagiarism," noting that some allegations are more about the person who supposedly plagiarized than they are about the actual plagiarism itself. "The problem with these investigations is that they don't have the intention of improving academic/research integrity," he wrote in January 2024. "Their intention is to find plagiarism that they can then use to attack the relevant person or institution."

Bailey listed examples like a 2016 Melania Trump speech, Joe Biden's plagiarism scandal during his 1988 presidential campaign and a separate allegation against Harris, all of which Snopes previously fact-checked. Furthermore, his article criticizing the "weaponization of plagiarism" was actually a response to another such allegation from Rufo.

In December 2023, Rufo published a piece on Substack alleging that then-Harvard University President Claudine Gay had stolen passages from others in both her published academic work and in her Ph.D. thesis. Harvard investigated and found no substantial wrongdoing, but the political backlash didn't stop. Right-leaning politicians and pundits denounced Harvard, and prominent donors threatened to pull their funding. Gay, the first Black woman to serve as Harvard's president, resigned on Jan. 3, 2024.

Sources

"About." Mysite, https://www.joanochamilton.com. Accessed 24 Oct. 2024.

"About the Author." Plagiarism Today, https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/about-plagiarism-today/about-the-author/. Accessed 24 Oct. 2024.

Bailey, Jonathan. "The Kamala Harris Plagiarism Scandal." Plagiarism Today, 15 Oct. 2024, https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2024/10/15/the-kamala-harris-plagiarism-scandal/.

---. "The Second Kamala Harris Plagiarism Scandal." Plagiarism Today, 23 Oct. 2024, https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2024/10/23/the-second-kamala-harris-plagiarism-scandal/.

---. "The Weaponization of Plagiarism." Plagiarism Today, 8 Jan. 2024, https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2024/01/08/the-weaponization-of-plagiarism-2/.

Garrigan, Mike, and Forrest Nelson. "Logli Responds to National Reports That Kamala Harris 'Lifted Language' from Him in 2007." Https://Www.Wifr.Com, 23 Oct. 2024, https://www.wifr.com/2024/10/23/logli-responds-national-reports-that-kamala-harris-lifted-language-him-2007/.

Harris, Kamala D., and Joan O'C. Hamilton. Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer. Chronicle Books, 2009.

Hruby, Denise. "The 'Plagiarism Hunter' Terrorizing the German-Speaking World." The New York Times, 10 Sept. 2021. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/world/europe/plagiarism-baerbock-austria-germany.html.

"Interactive Media Bias Chart." Ad Fontes Media, https://adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart/. Accessed 24 Oct. 2024.

John Jay College Of Criminal Justice | The City University of New York| High Point Police Department Wins Innovation Award for Drug Market Strategy Designed by Professor David Kennedy. https://johnjay.jjay.cuny.edu/newsroom/948.php. Accessed 24 Oct. 2024.

Lee, Eric. Community Courts: An Evolving Model. NCJ 183452, Bureau of Justice Assistance, Oct. 2000, https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/bja/183452.pdf.

"Midtown Community Court." Wikipedia, 12 Dec. 2008. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Midtown_Community_Court&oldid=257515064.

Palma, Bethania. "What Is Critical Race Theory and Why Are Some People So Mad at It?" Snopes, 27 May 2021, https://www.snopes.com//news/2021/05/27/what-is-critical-race-theory/.

Patrice, Joe. Boutique Sues Winston & Strawn For Violating "Copyright" In Rule 12 Brief - Above the Law. 28 Dec. 2023, https://abovethelaw.com/2023/12/boutique-sues-winston-strawn-copyright-brief/.

Plagiarism FAQs - Purdue OWL® - Purdue University. https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/avoiding_plagiarism/plagiarism_faq.html. Accessed 24 Oct. 2024.

Rufo, Christopher F. Kamala Harris's Plagiarism Problem. https://christopherrufo.com/p/kamala-harriss-plagiarism-problem. Accessed 24 Oct. 2024.

Saul, Stephanie, et al. "Conservative Activist Seizes on Passages From Harris Book." The New York Times, 14 Oct. 2024. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/14/us/christopher-rufo-kamala-harris-book.html.

Sibarium, Aaron. Kamala Harris Plagiarized Pages of Congressional Testimony From a Republican Colleague. Plus, a Fictionalized Story About Human Trafficking. 22 Oct. 2024, https://freebeacon.com/democrats/kamala-harris-plagiarized-pages-of-congressional-testimony-from-a-republican-colleague-plus-a-fictionalized-story-about-human-trafficking/.

Solomon, Amy L., et al. Outside the Walls: A National Snapshot of Community-Based Prisoner Reentry Programs. Urban Institute, https://webarchive.urban.org/UploadedPDF/410911_OTWResourceGuide.pdf.

Steck, Em. "Harris Lifted Language from Republican Attorney in Her 2007 Congressional Testimony | CNN Politics." CNN, 22 Oct. 2024, https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/22/politics/kamala-harris-plagiarism-allegation-congressional-testimony/index.html.

"Study: Low Graduation Rates in City Schools." NBC News, 1 Apr. 2008, https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna23897401.

Sviridoff, Michele, et al. Dispensing Justice Locally: The Implementation and Effects of the Midtown Community Court. Center for Court Innovation, https://www.innovatingjustice.org/sites/default/files/dispensing%20justice%20locallyI.pdf.

Waddick, Karissa. "Harris' Campaign Rebuts Plagiarism Claims." USA TODAY, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/10/16/harris-plagiarism-christopher-rufo/75699787007/. Accessed 24 Oct. 2024.

By Jack Izzo

Jack Izzo is a Chicago-based journalist and two-time "Jeopardy!" alumnus.

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BooksPlagiarismKamala Harris2024 Election

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What We Know About Plagiarism Allegations Against Harris (2024)

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