Like her boss, President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris is a plagiarist.
The Democratic presidential candidate stole material from several sources for a book she co-wrote and published prior to her run to become California’s attorney general.
On top of allegations that her husband, Doug Emhoff, walloped an old girlfriend, today’s revelation from plagiarism sleuth Christopher Rufo is yet another significant blow to Harris’ troubled, failing campaign.
German Plagiarism Hunter Nailed Literary Theft
The book in question, Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer, which Harris wrote with Joan O’C Hamilton, is riddled with plagiarized passages, Rufo reported, citing Austrian Stefan Weber, who does to German-speaking politicians what Rufo does to American academics.
Weber reported that the book “contains more than a dozen ‘vicious plagiarism fragments,’” Rufo explained:
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 ripped off an NBC News-Associated Press report on high-school graduation rates, and also “reproduced extensive sections from a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release” without attribution:
She and her co-author passed off the language as their own, copying multiple paragraphs virtually verbatim.
On X, Rufo reproduced material that the two authors purloined from Wikipedia. “She not only assumes the online encyclopedia’s accuracy, but copies its language nearly verbatim, without citing the source,” Rufo explained.
Here is what Harris wrote:
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.
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 relies on partnerships with local residents, businesses and social service agencies to organize community restitution 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 mandating them to receive social services to address 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,” Rufo continued in his Substack exposé:
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.
The literary theft is a “textbook definition of plagiarism,” Rufo noted. And even if Harris relied on her coauthor to write the book, that fact is not “exculpatory.” At minimum, Harris was an accomplice in the literary crime, accomplice being a term with which former prosecutor Harris is intimately familiar.
Biden, Too
What effect the news will have on Harris’ campaign is unclear, given that revelations about Emhoff, and, of course, running mate Tim Walz, haven’t yet driven her from the race in shame. But the campaign is leaking oil. Top far-left Democrat analysts say Harris is in deep trouble in the all-critical swing states.
Still, it’s worth remembering that Biden’s plagiarism, which was much worse in some ways, ended his first run for the presidency. On September 13, 1987, the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd disclosed that Biden robbed British Labour Leader Neil Kinnock, incorporating details from Kinnock’s life into his own.
Two examples:
Kinnock: Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Why is Glenys [his wife] the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because all our predecessors were thick?
Biden: Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university? Why is it that my wife who is sitting out there in the audience is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? Is it because I’m the first Biden in a thousand generations to get a college and a graduate degree that I was smarter than the rest?
Biden also plagiarized a paper in law school at Syracuse University. The law-school faculty convicted Biden of using misappropriated material from the Fordham Law Review.
Biden quit the 1988 presidential race on September 23, 1987 with these words: “I do it with incredible reluctance, and it makes me angry.”
