Just hours after Christopher Rufo alleged that Vice President Kamala Harris plagiarized sections of her 2009 book, Smart on Crime, he reported that the publisher was scrambling to address the situation.
“BREAKING: Kamala Harris’s publisher, Chronicle Books, is in damage control mode. The company accidentally sent my team an internal communication indicating that VP Lauren Hoffman is requiring that all inquiries about Harris’s plagiarism go through the higher ups,” Rufo posted on X.
He included a screenshot of an email that he claimed was mistakenly sent to him, which instructed staff to direct any questions regarding the plagiarism allegations to senior executives.
The email, sent at 3:31 PM PDT on Monday, had the subject line “publicity.”
“Per Lauren Hoffman (VP, Executive Director of Marketing and Publicity) please do not respond or comment on any inquiries regarding SMART ON CRIME, and please continue to forward them directly to me. Really appreciate your help on this it is a sensitive topic.”
While multiple mainstream media outlets picked up Rufo’s claims, their coverage primarily focused on criticizing him.
“Conservative Activist Seizes on Passages From Harris Book,” read a headline from the New York Times. The article noted that a “plagiarism expert” assessed the passages and concluded they were “not serious.”
“Somebody hang this in the Louvre,” Rufo quipped about the NYT piece. “The New York Times claims that I ‘seize[d] on’ Kamala Harris’s serial plagiarism. Admits later in the story that it is, in fact, plagiarism. And then calls noticing that fact ‘racist.’”
