Vice President Kamala Harris has been accused of plagiarizing “at least a dozen sections of her criminal justice book, Smart on Crime,” according to journalist Christopher Rufo.
Rufo’s report drew upon claims from Dr. Stefan Weber, known as a “plagiarism hunter,” who has ended the careers of German politicians. Weber claimed that Harris “copied virtually an entire Wikipedia article into her book without providing any attribution to Wikipedia.”
The vice president also “fabricated a source reference, inventing a nonexistent page number” as well as copying “self-promotional content” from Goodwill Industries.
Harris also copied sections from a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release. In Rufo’s side-by-side comparison of the content, only one word was different.
Large sections of Harris’s book were also taken from a Bureau of Justice Assistance report, which was linked in a Wikipedia article that was also plagiarized.
“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 wrote on Substack.
The Harris campaign was previously criticized for directly copying and pasting policies from the Biden campaign’s website.
The New Republic reported at the time that the source code from the page encourages voters to support Joe Biden. The outlet explained that the “language was visible when links to the campaign site were shared, and in the website’s description on Google searches.”
While the code was later changed, The New Republic noted that the content still created the “impression that at least some of the Harris campaign’s policy language was copied and pasted from Biden’s documents.”
