Kamala Harris is facing accusations of plagiarism after passages of a book she wrote in 2009 were discovered to closely resemble an interview once given by Martin Luther King Jr.
Several passages in her first book, Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer, are thought to have been lifted from Wikipedia and other sources without attribution, according to a bombshell new report.
The Trump campaign has said that research by Stefan Weber, an Austrian academic and dubbed a “plagiarism hunter”, showed that Harris had lifted many sections of other works without appropriate citation.
According to Weber, the plagiarism in Harris’ book ranges from minor transgressions” to more “serious infractions”.
In his 49-page report, Weber highlighted a section that bears a striking resemblance to a story told by the civil rights leader.
The Democratic presidential candidate wrote: “My mother used to laugh when she told the story about a time I was fussing as a toddler. She leaned down to ask me: ‘Kamala, what’s wrong? What do you want?’ and I wailed back, ‘Fweedom’.”
The story shared by King, who told Playboy Magazine in 1965, is as follows: “I will never forget a moment in Birmingham when a white policeman accosted a little Negro girl, seven or eight years old, who was walking in a demonstration with her mother.
“‘What do you want?’ the policeman asked her gruffly, and the little girl looked at him straight in the eye and answered, ‘Fee-dom’.”
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The report also shows that Harris lifted verbatim content from Wikipedia, press releases, and an entire section from an Associated Press story from 2008 about low graduation rates - all without properly citing the sources.
“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,” said author and activist Christopher Russo, who shared the report on his substack.
In his report, Weber wrote: “What do these findings say about Kamala Harris? Is she in part fake? Did her ghostwriter plagiarise? Was it just the team behind her? I have no idea. I let other people from the US draw the right conclusions.”
JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, slammed Harris online: “Lmao Kamala didn’t even write her own book!”
“I wrote my own book, unlike Kamala Harris, who copied hers from Wikipedia. Cue the corporate media ‘fact checkers’: ‘Vance’s tweet is missing important context. Kamala Harris only copied some of her book from Wikipedia’.”
Donald Trump Jr chimed in with further outrage, writing on social media: “Yikes! More evidence that Kamala Harris is a fraud!!!”
Harris wrote the book when she was considering a run to be California’s attorney-general, a race in which she was successful just a year later. She co-wrote it with Joan O’C Hamilton, a ghostwriter.
“Harris shatters the old distinctions rooted in false choices and myths. She presents practical solutions for making the criminal justice system truly—not just rhetorically—tough,” the blurb from her publisher reads.
In 1987, Joe Biden’s first presidential campaign was hindered by plagiarism accusations. The then-senator was accused of copying a speech by Neil Kinnock, the leader of the Labour party at the time.
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