Harris' campaign rebuts plagiarism claims

WASHINGTON - Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris ’ campaign refuted allegations from a conservative activist that she plagiarized portions of a 2009 book she co-authored, describing the claims as a partisan attempt by right-wing operatives to influence the election.

Conservative commentator and activist Christopher Rufo surfaced the allegations earlier this week in a Substack post claiming that there were at least five “serious” pieces of copied material in Harris' book, "Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make us Safer." Rufo’s post pulled from a larger investigation completed by Austrian “plagiarism hunter” Stefan Weber.

“Some 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,” Rufo wrote in his post about the vice president's book.

Weber’s initial report found that there were 18 instances of plagiarism throughout the 200-page book first published as Harris was starting what would become a successful 2010 campaign for attorney general of California. The examples Rufo cited in his Substack post amount to roughly 500 words out of the 65,000 words in the book.

Most portions in question range from several words to sentences. They often describe statistics and processes. The authors cited their sources in the book’s footnotes, but on multiple occasions they failed to put sentences they pulled verbatim in quotation marks.

Weber notes that one passage of the book describing a New York court program appears to be pulled from a 2008 Wikipedia page. He also accused the book's co-authors of copying phrases from a newspaper article, and then goes on to suggest that the phrasing may have “originated from a press release authored by Harris or an assistant,” given the positive tone of coverage in the newspaper.

Harris’ campaign described the allegations as part of a last-ditch effort by Republicans to stunt Harris’ momentum three weeks before Election Day.

“Rightwing operatives are getting desperate as they see the bipartisan coalition of support Vice President Harris is building to win this election,” Harris campaign spokesperson James Singer said in a statement.

“This is a book that’s been out for 15 years, and the Vice President clearly cited sources and statistics in footnotes and endnotes throughout,” he added.

Jonathan Bailey, publisher of the online site Plagiarism Today, said in a blog post on Tuesday that the cited alleged instances of plagiarism from Harris’ book are examples of “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,” Bailey wrote.

He suggested that citing source material and copying text verbatim without quotes was commonplace in the early 2000s, around the time when Harris’ book was published.

“Poor writing techniques and the lack of accessible plagiarism detection tools made this a common problem, especially before the 2010s,” Bailey wrote.

Other prominent political figures – from Melania Trump to President Joe Biden and Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch – have come under scrutiny in the past for alleged plagiarism.

Melania Trump copied parts of a speech by former first lady Michelle Obama during an address at the Republican National Convention in 2016, while Biden faced backlash while running for president in the 1988 campaign for admitting to plagiarism in law school. Gorsuch, appointed by former President Donald Trump , was accused in 2017 of pulling passages of his book from a law journal article.

Rufo was also responsible for efforts to force former Harvard University President Claudine Gay to resign. Rufo accused Gay, Harvard’s first Black woman president, of plagiarizing. The allegations came as Gay faced criticism over her handling of campus protests against the war in Gaza and alleged instances of antisemitism.

(This story has been updated with a new headline.)

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Harris' campaign rebuts plagiarism claims