CV NEWS FEED // A study conducted by a world-renowned plagiarism detection expert found that 2024 Democratic nominee Kamala Harris plagiarized a significant amount of her 2009 book “Smart on Crime.”
“Kamala Harris plagiarized at least a dozen sections of her criminal-justice book, Smart on Crime, according to a new investigation,” scholar Christopher Rufo wrote on X (formerly Twitter) Monday morning.
“The current vice president even lifted material from Wikipedia,” Rufo added.
Last year, Rufo helped break the story of the numerous plagiarism allegations against then-Harvard President Claudine Gay.
Alleged photographic evidence Rufo had posted to X at the time suggesting that Gay plagiarized much of her Ph.D. paper was widely cited as a major factor in her resignation just weeks later.
In a subsequent X post this week, Rufo noted that he has “independently confirmed multiple violations” in Harris’ book “which are comparable in severity to the plagiarism found in” Gay’s heavily scrutinized paper.
The investigation into “Smart on Crime” was “conducted by Dr. Stefan Weber, a famed Austrian ‘plagiarism hunter’ who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world,” Rufo reported.
Harris penned the book along with ghostwriter Joan O’C. Hamilton – credited as a co-author – while the future vice president was serving as District Attorney of San Francisco. One year later, Harris would be elected as the Attorney General of California.
The book’s full title is “Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer.”
‘The receipts’
Like in his viral December 2023 X thread exposing Gay’s alleged plagiarism, Rufo posted several graphics reportedly showing side-by-side comparisons of excerpts from Harris’ book and its apparent source material.
Rufo pointed out that Harris “lifted verbatim language from an uncited AP/NBC News report in a “passage in which Harris discusses high school graduation rates.”
“In another section of the book, Harris, without proper attribution, reproduced extensive sections from a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release,” Rufo wrote in his next X post. “She and her co-author passed off the language as their own, copying multiple paragraphs virtually verbatim.”
“In a section about a New York court program, Harris stole long passages directly from Wikipedia,” Rufo added. Harris “not only assumes the online encyclopedia’s accuracy, but copies its language nearly verbatim, without citing the source,” he wrote.
“Harris also copied language from a Bureau of Justice Assistance report, which was linked in the Wikipedia entry,” Rufo continued in his Monday X thread. “Finally, when attempting to write a description of a nonprofit group, Harris simply lifted promotional language from an Urban Institute report, and failed to cite her source.”
“Of course, Harris, like many other public figures, may have relied entirely on a ghostwriter to draft her book,” Rufo wrote in a Substack post titled “Kamala Harris’s Plagiarism Problem.”
“But that is not exculpatory,” the scholar added. “Harris, at the end of the day, put her name on the cover.”
“On that point, one might recall the title of her book: Smart on Crime,” he stressed. “There is nothing smart about plagiarism, which is the equivalent of an academic crime.”