Legacy media are working overtime to delegitimize a new report indicating Kamala Harris allegedly plagiarized parts of a book she co-authored.
The cover-up began on Monday shortly after the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo reported findings by Austrian “plagiarism hunter” Stefan Weber, who purportedly discovered that a 2009 book co-authored by Harris and Joan O’C. Hamilton contains passages seemingly lifted from various other published works and websites. The book is titled Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer.
Rufo noted how “[s]ome of the passages [Weber] highlighted appear to contain minor transgressions — reproducing small sections of text; insufficient paraphrasing — but others seem to reflect more serious infractions, similar in severity to those found in Harvard president Claudine Gay’s doctoral thesis.” The report cited numerous examples in which Harris and her co-author seemingly lifted text from sources such as an NBC News article, a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release, and a Wikipedia article.
In an effort to run damage control for Harris’ flailing campaign, the anti-speech New York Times dispatched three “journalists” to pen an article aimed at undercutting Rufo’s reporting. Replaying their worn-out “Republicans pounce!” playbook with the headline “Conservative Activist Seizes on Passages From Harris Book,” authors Stephanie Saul, Vimal Patel, and Dylan Freedman attempted to convince Times readers that the massive scandal is just another “right-wing” nothingburger.
“In a review of the book, The New York Times found that none of the passages in question took the ideas or thoughts of another writer, which is considered the most serious form of plagiarism. Instead, the sentences copy descriptions of programs or statistical information that appear elsewhere,” they deceptively wrote before admitting the passages cited by Rufo “appeared to have been taken partly from other published work without quotation marks.”
In one example discovered by Weber and subsequently reported by Rufo, Harris and O’C. Hamilton seemingly lifted “verbatim language from an uncited NBC News report” when writing about high school graduation statistics in their book.
The bolded parts from the following book passage are the “duplicated material[s]” seemingly taken from the NBC report, according to Rufo.
In Detroit’s public schools, only 25 percent of the students who enrolled in grade nine graduated from high school, while 30.5 percent graduated in Indianapolis public schools and 34 percent received diplomas in the Cleveland Municipal City School District. Overall, about 70 percent of the U.S. students graduate from public and private schools on time with a regular diploma, and about 1.2 million students drop out annually. Only about half of the students served by public school systems in the nation’s largest cities receive diplomas.
That apparently wasn’t questionable enough for Saul, Patel, and Freedom to do actual reporting. Instead, the three took their Democrat activism a step further by contacting a so-called “plagiarism expert” to downplay the findings.
In his remarks to the Times, New Orleans-based plagiarism consultant Jonathan Bailey acted as if he could read Harris’ mind on the subject, saying the vice president’s alleged plagiarism “amounts to an error and not an intent to defraud.” He later clarified in an X post he has “NOT performed a full analysis of the book,” adding that his “quotes were based on information provided to [him] by the reporters and [he] spoke only about those passages.”
And if their desperation to cover for Harris wasn’t pathetic enough, the Times authors went out of their way to insinuate that Rufo’s examination of Harris and other left-wing partisans’ literary works for potential acts of plagiarism was racially motivated. Citing his work in exposing Harvard’s Claudine Gay and academics promoting DEI ideology, the authors wrote, “Some academics, however, have characterized [Rufo’s] campaign as racist.”
Left-wing outlets such as The Daily Beast and CNN followed the Times’ lead in using the “Republicans pounce!” framing in their respective coverage of the bombshell. The latter outlet, however, admitted that its review of “several of the passages highlighted by Rufo … found that Harris and O’C. Hamilton failed to properly attribute language to sources.”
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
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