Kamala Harris hit by fresh plagiarism allegations

Kamala Harris in 2007 as district attorney
Kamala Harris made the allegedly plagiarised testimony in 2007 when she was a district attorney

Kamala Harris has become embroiled in a second plagiarism row after she was accused of copying a Republican’s congressional testimony.

The vice-president was last week accused of taking more than a dozen sections of her book Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer from other sources, including a story once told by Martin Luther King Jr.

Now, fresh allegations have emerged that the former prosecutor lifted more than 1,000 words from the testimony of a Republican state attorney when called as a witness before Congress.

The historical allegations date from 2007 when Ms Harris testified before a House Judiciary Committee in support of a bill that would have created a loan repayment scheme for state and local prosecutors.

Ms Harris, then the district attorney of San Francisco, argued the so-called John R. Justice Act would draw top legal talent to offices like hers. The bill was ultimately unsuccessful as it never passed the upper house.

Passages of Ms Harris’ testimony, submitted on April 24, 2007, are alleged to have been copied from Paul Logli, the then state attorney of Winnebago County, Illinois, who had testified in support of the legislation two months earlier before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Of the roughly 1,500 words Ms Harris devoted to discussion of the legislation, nearly 1,200 of them appear to be copied verbatim from the statement Mr Logli, a Republican, submitted to the Senate committee on Feb 27, 2007, the Washington Free Beacon claims.

Side-by-side analysis of the two passages carried out by The Telegraph found evidence of extensive similarities, with Ms Harris’s testimony occasionally correcting small grammatical errors, such as swapping the word “who” for “whom”.

The statements use the same language, refer to the same sources and appear to make the same arguments in the same order, with the addition of occasional paragraphs. Beyond citing the same evidence, the conclusions they deduce also appear to mirror one another almost word for word.

In her written statement, Ms Harris described how debt-ridden prosecutors switch to the private sector after a few years in the job, lured by the prospect of a better salary to help them pay off their law school debt.

As a result, she stated, many district attorney’s offices are short-staffed, forcing them to appoint relatively inexperienced attorneys to complex cases, such as those involving child abuse, elder neglect, domestic violence, identity theft and public corruption.

By repaying the loans of prosecutors and public defenders through implementing the bipartisan bill, Ms Harris argued, lawyers would be incentivised to remain in public service.

Her conclusion almost exactly mirrors Mr Logli’s testimony.

Mr Logli told The Telegraph that he believed the similarities between the two witness statements stemmed from overstretched staff cutting corners at the National District Attorneys Association, whom they both represented.

“If the statements were very alike, I don’t think it’s an act of plagiarism as much as it was a case of relying on stuff people who helped write the statement cut and paste,” he said. “They probably cut corners because they were overstretched.

“They probably should have advised Kamala about what I said before the Senate and they probably should have changed things around, but that’s staff responsibility.”

Paul Logli
Paul Logli said the similarities were probably caused by staff being overstretched - The Chronicle Collection

It comes after the vice-president was accused last week of copying more than a dozen sections of the book that helped launch her political career from various sources, including a speech from Martin Luther King Jr. and Wikipedia.

In the book, released in 2009, she appears to borrow from King in an anecdote from her childhood during the civil rights movement.

The 59-year-old 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 bears close similarities to one shared by the civil rights leader, as the New York Post previously noted.

“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,” King told Playboy magazine in 1965.

“‘What do you want?’ the policeman asked her gruffly, and the little girl looked at him straight in the eye and answered, ‘Fee-dom’,”.

‘Serious infractions’

Stefan Weber, an Austrian academic dubbed the “plagiarism hunter”, claimed that the plagiarism in Ms Harris’s book ranges from “minor transgressions” to more “serious infractions”.

The claims were initially rebuffed by major news outlets including The New York Times, who suggested the similarities were “an error and not an intent to defraud”. However, Jonathan Bailey, a “plagiarism expert” quoted in the paper’s story, has since admitted that the allegations were “more serious” than it first seemed.

Addressing the latest allegations, Mr Bailey told The Telegraph: “It’s definitely a clear cut case of plagiarism.

“Politicians and district attorneys copy each other all the time, but it’s very rare for it to be someone in an unrelated area and for it to be from a political opponent.”

The latest allegations will add fuel to concerns about the integrity of Ms Harris, who has sought to portray herself as the candidate of honesty, in contrast with Donald Trump, who Democrats have repeatedly accused of lying to voters.

O.H. Skinner, Arizona’s former solicitor general told The Washington Free Beacon: “Being a state’s top lawyer is a real responsibility,”

“It requires attention to detail. When you cannot bother to produce your own work, it says something about your approach to a job that demands the best from those in it.”

The Harris campaign and Paul Logli were approached for comment.

Regarding previous plagiarism allegations concerning the vice-president’s book, the Harris campaign said the claims were a result of Right-wing “operatives” becoming desperate in the face of support for the Democratic presidential candidate.

James Singer, a spokesman, said: “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.”

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