US Vice President Kamala Harris is under scrutiny due to allegations of plagiarism in a book she co-authored in 2009. According to Newsweek, Dr Stefan Weber, a renowned ‘plagiarism hunter’ from Austria, has claimed that Ms Harris and co-author Joan O’C Hamilton had 27 “fragments of plagiarism” in the book ‘Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer’. Mr Weber and his team also alleged that the Democratic presidential nominee and her co-author copied and pasted from a Wikipedia article for the book. 

According to Newsweek, Mr Weber accused Ms Harris of reproducing verbatim language from sources such as news articles and studies in his report. “Kamala Harris fabricated a source reference, inventing a nonexistent page number. The self-promotional content from Goodwill Industries was copied verbatim without citing the source (Goodwill Industries was her ‘primary partner’ on in [sic] the ‘Back on Track’ program),” he said. 

“In many other instances, even when a source was cited with a footnote, the text was directly copied and pasted without using quotation marks. Quotation marks would have been the most transparent and honest approach, also in non-academic books. Further signs of dishonesty may be evident when sources were copied but specific details were altered, such as replacing a Subway store owner with a sandwich shop clerk (p. 124) or highlighting Southeast Asia in the context of the US gang problem (p. 184),” Mr Weber added. 

Further, the Austrian professor alleged that one particular mention of New York City’s Midtown Community Court in the book pertains to its use of language and structure that closely mirrors a Wikipedia article, indicating a lack of proper citation and paraphrasing. Mr Weber also highlighted minor and serious infractions, claiming that some text was directly copied from sources without adequate acknowledgement. In his report, he also showed specific plagiarism allegations regarding a mention of the West Palm Beach Community Court in Ms Harris’ book.

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“After copying from the Wikipedia article, she continues by copying from the PDF linked in the Wikipedia article’s first reference. Although she acknowledges at the end of the book that she took examples of community courts from that report (without providing the URL), the copied sections are presented as if they were her own words. The word-for-word copying still requires quotation marks to maintain proper attribution,” Mr Weber wrote.

He also pointed out that while some parts of the appropriate content may be cited, not enough of the original source is acknowledged, a technique known as “pawn sacrifice plagiarism”.

Mr Weber even claimed that in 2009, Ms Harris gave a “live” interview about the book to CBS, “which in parts consisted of a prior interview for another media which in turn contains many verbatim text chunks from her book.”

Meanwhile, reacting to the accusations, Senator JD Vance trolled Ms Harris for using Wikipedia, claiming that he at least authored his own book. “Lmao Kamala didn’t even write her own book!” he tweeted. 

Donald Trump Jr. also commented on the issue, writing, “Yikes! More evidence that Kamala Harris is a fraud!!!”