Kamala Harris plagiarized more than a dozen sections of her book, Smart on Crime, including material from Wikipedia, according to an investigation.
The findings by Dr. Stefan Weber, a professional “plagiarism hunter” confirmed multiple instances of unauthorized copying within the Vice President’s 2009 book.
Dr. Weber found Harris had “copied virtually an entire Wikipedia article” into her book without providing attribution. She also fabricated a source reference to a non-existent page number, while correctly cited sections appeared to have been copied and pasted without using quotation marks.
A section on high school graduation rates was copied verbatim from an Associated Press news report, with some statistics merely rounded down to the nearest whole number in order to differentiate her book from the article.
Harris also reproduced a press release from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. State names were written in full rather than abbreviated, while “%” was written as “percent” in an attempt to circumvent plagiarism detectors.
The Democratic presidential nominee may have hoped the changing nature of Wikipedia would prevent detectors from noticing her copy and pasting skills. Unfortunately for Harris, Dr. Weber was able to discover the unattributed article in question through its edit history.
Through references on Wikipedia itself, Harris duplicated material from other sources…
… And she would rarely cite the few she used.
The thread was shared on X by investigative journalist Christopher Rufo, who wrote comprehensively about the findings in his newsletter. When he tried to contact Harris’ publisher, Chronicle Books, he was accidentally sent an internal memo about the ongoing allegations.
Meanwhile in liberal land, the New York Times has framed this in “Republicans pounce!” terms.
