(DailyChive.com) – Vice President Kamala Harris is facing new plagiarism allegations after investigator Christopher Rufo uncovered several copied sections from her 2009 book, Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. The book, co-authored with Joan Hamilton, was intended to boost Harris’ political career. However, Rufo claims large parts of it were lifted from other sources without proper credit.
Rufo, citing plagiarism expert Stefan Weber, pointed to multiple passages copied almost word-for-word, without quotation marks or citations—clear signs of plagiarism. Some sections show minor paraphrasing mistakes, but others involve wholesale copying, comparable to the plagiarism scandal involving Claudine Gay, the current president of Harvard.
The Harris team did not respond to requests for comment on the findings, but Rufo insists the issue goes beyond minor slip-ups. “This isn’t just sloppiness,” Rufo said. “Harris and her co-author duplicated large portions of text without giving credit. In at least one case, they even used a poor-quality source, calling into question the reliability of their conclusions.”
Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance took to social media to ridicule Harris. “Hi, I’m JD Vance. I wrote my own book, unlike Kamala Harris, who copied hers from Wikipedia,” he posted, sharing the link to Rufo’s report.
This isn’t the first time Harris has been accused of borrowing from others. In a widely mocked incident, she claimed a childhood story about attending a civil rights protest, saying she fell out of her stroller and told her mother she wanted “fweedom.” Critics quickly pointed out the story is strikingly similar to one told by Martin Luther King Jr.
Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, has also faced backlash for allegedly exaggerating parts of his life story for political gain. Vance couldn’t resist taking a swipe at how he expected the media would handle the story. “Cue the corporate media ‘fact-checkers,’” Vance wrote sarcastically. “‘Vance’s tweet is missing context. Kamala Harris only copied some of her book from Wikipedia.’”
The controversy raises questions about the standards public figures follow, or fail to follow, when presenting their work. As Vance’s joke suggests, whether the media will cover this story with the same intensity as others remains to be seen.
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