A right-wing activist on Monday accused Vice President Kamala Harris of plagiarism over passages of a book she co-authored more than a decade ago.
Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank, wrote in a blog post that Harris pulled “verbatim language” from uncited sources in passages for Smart on Crime, co-authored with writer Joan O’C. Hamilton in 2009.
“There is nothing smart about plagiarism, which is the equivalent of an academic crime,” Rufo wrote. “The publisher, as well as the sitting vice president, should retract the plagiarized passages and issue a correction. There should be a single standard—and Kamala Harris is falling short.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Published just before California appointed Harris as state attorney general, the book offers policy analysis and recommendations based on the vice-president’s experience as a prosecutor.
Rufo wrote specifically about six paragraphs in the 200-page tome, which CNN claims to have reviewed and found that Harris and her writing partner do indeed appear to have failed at times to properly attribute their content.
A separate New York Times review found “none of the passages in question took the ideas or thoughts of another writer”—typically considered the most serious type of plagiarism—while adding that Rufo cited passages which “appeared to have been taken partly from other published work without quotation marks.”
Harris’ campaign shot back at the allegations, claiming their candidate “clearly cited sources and statistics in footnotes and endnotes throughout.”
“Rightwing operatives are getting desperate as they see the bipartisan coalition of support Vice President Harris is building to win this election, as Trump retreats to a conservative echo chamber refusing to face questions about his lies,” campaign spokesperson James Singer told CNN.
Allegations of plagiarism made by Rufo have previously made headlines during this election cycle.
His accusations last year against Harvard’s then-president Claudine Gay played a major role in the furore which eventually led to her resignation in January.
That same month, billionaire Bill Ackman—who has thrown his backing behind Donald Trump—was forced to wind back his criticism of Gay over the plagiarism claims after it emerged that his wife, Neri Oxman, had also borrowed extensively from other scholars and even Wikipedia for her doctoral dissertation at MIT.
