Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris has been accused of plagiarizing sections of her first book, published in 2009, after a renowned "plagiarism hunter" found multiple passages that closely resembled or were taken word-for-word from other sources without attribution.
Conservative activist Christopher Rufo independently verified and then published the purported lifted sections in Harris' book, "Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer," first surfaced by Austrian Stefan Weber. Harris co-authored the book with ghostwriter Joan O'C. Hamilton.
Rufo said the violations "are comparable in severity to the plagiarism found in former Harvard president Claudine Gay's doctoral thesis."
According to Rufo, Harris lifted language from an Associated Press report verbatim, a John Jay College of Criminal Justice news release, a Bureau of Justice Assistance report, Wikipedia, and an Urban Institute report.
"Taken in total, there is certainly a breach of standards here," Rufo wrote. "Harris and her co-author duplicated long passages nearly verbatim without proper citation and without quotation marks, which is the textbook definition of plagiarism. They not only lifted material from sources without proper attribution, but in at least one case, relied on a low-quality source, which potentially undermined the accuracy of their conclusion."
Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, Republican Donald Trump's running mate, noticed.
"Hi, I'm JD Vance. I wrote my own book, unlike Kamala Harris, who copied hers from Wikipedia," he wrote in a post to X.
Wrote Donald Trump Jr. in a post on X: "Yikes! More evidence that Kamala Harris is a fraud!!!"
When contacted by the New York Post, Harris' ghostwriter replied, "Oh gosh."
"I haven't seen anything," Hamilton told the Post. "I'm afraid I can't talk to you right now, though, I'm in the middle of something. Let me go try to figure that out."
Harris also is accused of plagiarizing the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the same book. The Telegraph reported that an anecdote in Harris' "Smart on Crime" book closely resembles one that King gave in an interview to Playboy magazine in 1965.
It was the work of Rufo and Christopher Brunet who outed former Harvard President Gay, whom they found plagiarized sections of her 1997 doctorate dissertation. Gay subsequently stepped down as president of Harvard but remains on staff as a professor of government and African American studies.
Harris has published four books overall, including a children's book titled, "Superheroes Are Everywhere."
Mark Swanson ✉
Mark Swanson, a Newsmax writer and editor, has nearly three decades of experience covering news, culture and politics.
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