Kamala Harris Plagiarism Scandal
Jonathan BaileyOctober 15, 20245 minutes read
Yesterday, Christopher Rufo published an article accusing Vice President Kamala Harris of plagiarizing her 2009 book Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. In his article, he cited five passages in the book that bore strong similarities to earlier works.
That day, the New York Times called me and asked me to examine those five publicly available passages. I studied the passages and found that they were indicators of poor writing processes but did not make up a large portion of the work. As such, while I agree that the passages represent plagiarism and are issues that need to be addressed, they are relatively minor as far as plagiarism goes.
At the time, I was unaware of a full dossier with additional allegations, which led some to accuse the New York Times of withholding that information from me. However, the article clearly stated that it was my “initial reaction” to those allegations, not a complete analysis.
Today, I reviewed the complete dossier prepared by Dr. Stefan Weber, whom I have covered before. I also performed a peer review of one of his papers in 2018.
With this new information, while I believe the case is more serious than I commented to the New York Times, the overarching points remain. While there are problems with this work, the pattern points to sloppy writing habits, not a malicious intent to defraud.
Is it problematic? Yes. But it’s also not the wholesale fraud that many have claimed it to be. It sits somewhere between what the two sides want it to be.
