Harris campaign calls plagiarism allegations a partisan attack. Expert says it was “sloppy writing.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ The campaign denies allegations that she and a co-author plagiarized parts of a 2009 book about the U.S. criminal justice system as a desperate attempt by “right-wing activists” to distract voters.

Plagiarism experts and academics who reviewed the claims said some were harmless or could not be proven, and others were due to sloppy writing rather than malicious intent.

The allegations surrounding the book “Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer” came to the surface on Monday when conservative activist Christopher Rufo published a post an article on his Substack platform It included some passages that he said were copied from other sources without any or proper attribution.

“In sum, there is certainly a violation of standards here,” Rufo wrote. “Harris and her co-author copied long passages almost verbatim, without proper citations and without quotation marks, which is the textbook definition of plagiarism.”

James Singer, a spokesman for the Harris campaign, said in an emailed statement that the plagiarism allegations represent a partisan attack on a book Harris co-authored more than a decade ago.

“Right-wing activists are falling into despair as they see the bipartisan coalition of support that Vice President Harris is building to win this election, while (former President Donald) Trump retreats into a conservative echo chamber and refuses to face questions about his lies.” , wrote Singer. “This is a book that has been published for 15 years, and the vice president has clearly cited sources and statistics throughout the footnotes and endnotes.”

Rufo’s article cited a new study of Harris’ 248-page book by Stefan Weber, an Austrian scientist known in Europe as a “plagiarism hunter.” Among the findings are that the book plagiarized a section from a Wikipedia article and invented a childhood anecdote that came from Martin Luther King Jr., according to Weber.

Trump’s vice president, Republican Senator JD Vance of Ohio, used the allegations to attack Harris.

“Hi, I’m JD Vance. I wrote my own book, unlike Kamala Harris who copied her book from Wikipedia.” he wrote on X. Vance’s 2016 memoir: ” Hillbilly Elegy ” tells of his childhood as a worker in Kentucky and Ohio.

The allegation against King revolves around a story Harris said her mother told her about a time when she caused a fuss as a toddler. According to the book, her mother asked her what was wrong and what she wanted. “I yelled back, ‘Fweedom,'” Harris wrote. Weber said Harris copied the anecdote without attribution from an interview King gave in 1965.

However, other plagiarism experts questioned the seriousness of the claims. Jonathan Bailey, consultant and editor of the website Plagiarism Today, said in a Tuesday post that the King story allegation first emerged in early 2021 and could not be proven based on the available evidence. But several other allegations of plagiarism are more troubling, he said, including Weber’s claim that Harris’ book copied and pasted a section of a Wikipedia article without citing it.

But the patterns in the book suggest “sloppy writing habits rather than a malicious intent to defraud,” he said.

“Although some passages, such as the Wikipedia passage, are sloppy to the point of negligence, when one looks at the part of the book in question, the nature of the issues, and the citations provided, negligence remains more likely than malice in my eyes,” Bailey wrote .

Miguel Roig, psychology professor at St. John’s University in New York who investigates plagiarism in the natural sciencessaid that the errors described by Weber met the definition of plagiarism. But, he added, context is important. The problematic passages make up only a small portion of the overall book and “hardly seem like an attempt at fraud,” he said.

“Whenever minor issues like this arise, the offending authors should simply admit the obvious errors, apologize and, where possible, make corrections and just move on,” Roig said.

Harris wrote “Smart on Crime” when she was San Francisco’s district attorney. The book outlined her ideas for improving public safety and increasing the effectiveness of the criminal justice system. In 2010, a year after the book was published, she was elected attorney general of California.

Harris’ co-author Joan O’C. Hamilton, works as a book clerk and ghostwriter, according to their website.

Weber, the plagiarism researcher in Austria, said in an email that much of the work reviewing Harris’ book was done by a staff member he did not identify. But he said the employee was “driven by personal choices and interests, not political motives.” This was Weber’s first “international case,” he said.

He also said he was unaware that Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, had published books until the Harris review was published.

“Any scholar can feel free to read the books of Donald Trump or whoever, just like we did with Kamala Harris,” Weber said.

Debora Weber-WulffProfessor of media and computer science at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences in Germany and not related to Weber, echoed Bailey’s assessment and said the book’s publisher would have to decide whether any problems warranted removing it from sale. Legal action is unlikely as the original author of the plagiarized content would have to initiate a potentially costly legal battle.

“Nobody in their right mind would invite a suit like this,” Weber-Wulff said. “Only the lawyers benefit.”