Well, Kamala Harris did say that there’s nothing that Joe Biden has done that she would have done differently! Who knew that also included some hefty plagiarism?

Yesterday, investigative journalist Christopher Rufo (who, along with Aaron Sibarium at the Washington Free Beacon, has made quite a name for himself in exposing plagiarism in academia, along with DEI initiatives in big companies) dropped a pretty big bombshell on Kamala Harris and her co-author/ghostwriter Joan O’C. Hamilton about their 2010 book, “Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer” – which was published during Kamala’s initial race for California Attorney General. The book is now only available as an e-book, but it is still available to purchase. Rufo gave the book to an Austrian researcher who looks for plagiarism – and guess what he found!

At the beginning of Harris’s political career, in the run-up to her campaign to serve as California’s attorney general, she and co-author Joan O’C Hamilton published a small volume, entitled “Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer.” The book helped to establish her credibility on criminal-justice issues.

However, according to Stefan Weber, a famed Austrian “plagiarism hunter” who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world, Harris’s book contains more than a dozen “vicious plagiarism fragments.” Some of the passages he 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. (Harris did not respond to a request for comment.)

Taken in total, there is certainly a breach of standards here. Harris and her co-author duplicated long passages nearly verbatim without proper citation and without quotation marks, which is the textbook definition of plagiarism. They not only lifted material from sources without proper attribution, but in at least one case, relied on a low-quality source, which potentially undermined the accuracy of their conclusion.

Of course, Harris, like many other public figures, may have relied entirely on a ghostwriter to draft her book. But that is not exculpatory: Harris, at the end of the day, put her name on the cover.

Rufo posted the receipts on X, as well as on his Substack.

In another section of the book, Harris, without proper attribution, reproduced extensive sections from a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release. She and her co-author passed off the language as their own, copying multiple paragraphs virtually verbatim. Here is the… pic.twitter.com/9FpsxQE8Sz

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 14, 2024

Harris also copied language from a Bureau of Justice Assistance report report, which was linked in the the Wikipedia entry. Here is the passage in Harris's book, with duplicated material in the other column: pic.twitter.com/aU7CbP0ODm

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 14, 2024

That Kamala Harris and her ghostwriter would be so lazy as to cut and paste from Wikipedia is actually pretty shocking. I mean, even high school students know they can’t do that! When called up by the New York Post, the ghostwriter, Hamilton, bailed on the call.

“Oh gosh,” Harris’ ghostwriter told The Post over the phone shortly after the allegations were published.

“I haven’t seen anything,” she added. “I’m afraid I can’t talk to you right now, though, I’m in the middle of something. Let me go try to figure that out.”

Yeah, that “something” she was “in the middle of” was probably trying to figure out how to cover her ass. With Kamala Harris’s known “intellectualism,” it wouldn’t be an off-base assumption that she barely wrote anything for the book, and then DIDN’T READ IT HERSELF before having it published under her name. Kamala, who already lifted a Martin Luther King anecdote wholesale for her own personal story, is well-known to not do her own homework. So would it be shocking if, after drafting an outline of what she wanted the book to say, Kamala left it to Hamilton to ghostwrite the entire thing, and Hamilton “mailed it in,” so to speak? And Kamala, homework done, just turned it in without checking it out, or having anyone else look it over? While that is certainly the most likely explanation, it isn’t one that the Harris team will be happy about using. First of all, because it reinforces the idea that Kamala Harris doesn’t do her own work. Second, as Rufo said, the book is under HER name – and that makes all the plagiarism errors hers to own as well.

But never fear, the New York Times is here! And who is really at fault for this? Christopher Rufo, for POUNCING and SEIZING! The racist!

Somebody hang this in the Louvre. The New York Times claims that I "seize[d] on" Kamala Harris's serial plagiarism. Admits later in the story that it is, in fact, plagiarism. And then calls noticing that fact "racist." pic.twitter.com/igfEpwP1h7

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 14, 2024

Rufo ended up refuting the entire NYT piece on X because they cherry-picked the evidence presented. And that “plagiarism expert” that the NYT brought in? He later went on X and said that he didn’t ACKSHUALLY read the book, only what the NYT sent him. WHOOPS.

And Rufo warned everyone that he wasn’t dropping all his evidence at once. This morning, he pulled an Andrew Breitbart and released even MORE examples of plagiarism from the book.

MORE PLAGIARISM: This is a seventh instance of significant plagiarism by Kamala Harris. She copied the language verbatim from a California government website, substituting a single word, rather than paraphrasing it or putting it in quotations. We can keep this going for a while. pic.twitter.com/yHONocMSBh

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 15, 2024

Rufo is now up to eight specific instances of plagiarism. No wonder the publisher is in a panic – but they then committed the classic email blunder and hit “reply all” when telling their staff to not answer inquiries about the book and to send all requests up the ladder.

How is it that in the Year of Our Lord 2024 people are STILL accidentally Cc’ing the wrong recipients on email chains?! This is basic internet stuff! https://t.co/SBcULoBP6I

— Enguerrand VII de Coucy (@ingelramdecoucy) October 14, 2024

Kamala is going to be doing a town hall today with “Charlamange tha God” in Michigan – presumably to boost her “cred” with male voters. Odds that he asks about the plagiarism allegations? Low to non-existent. But tomorrow, Kamala Harris is taking the ultimate plunge and doing an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier. The Democrats’ internal polling must be AWFUL for her campaign staff to send her into a challenging interview – which will be aired unedited, according to Baier himself. Will Baier ask her about the plagiarism allegations? There’s at least a 50-50 chance. Her staff is probably workshopping an answer for her to memorize right now.

Featured image: original Victory Girls art by Darleen Click