‘DESPERATE’

Harris Campaign Slaps Down Right-Wing Activist’s Plagiarism Allegations

Christopher Rufo has attacked a 2009 book co-authored by the vice president, but experts dismissed the claims of plagiarism as largely unfounded.

Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign on Tuesday dismissed as “desperate” a conservative activist’s accusations that she plagiarized passages in a book she co-authored more than a decade ago. Christopher Rufo claimed that five sections of 2009’s Smart on Crime were lifted from other sources—extracts that totaled about 500 words across a 66,500-word, 200-page book. The New York Times and The Washington Post subsequently reported that the allegations concerned statistics or verbatim language from other sources used without quotation marks, but that most of those sources were correctly cited in footnotes or the sources section of the book. Jonathan Bailey, a plagiarism consultant, told the Post that the errors were “sloppy” and “bad” but did not amount to the “malicious plagiarism” that Rufo seemed to be alleging. He added to the Times that the allegations amounted “to an error and not an intent to defraud.” In a statement to the Daily Beast, campaign spokesman James Singer said, “Rightwing operatives are getting desperate as they see the bipartisan coalition of support Vice President Harris is building to win this election, as Trump retreats to a conservative echo chamber refusing to face questions about his lies. 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.”