On Tuesday, new claims of plagiarism emerged against Vice President Kamala Harris — including accusations that she fabricated a story about sex trafficking and fabricated the work of other prosecutors, a judge and even Wikipedia to compile state reports on crime.
Harris, 60, appears to have completely fabricated the details of a sex crime case, borrowing sentences directly from published work by former California Attorney General Bill Lockyer and a New York lawyer.
The new charges were first reported by the Washington Free Beacon.
In a 2012 report on human trafficking that Harris issued while California’s attorney general cited a fictitious example of the type of call received by the National Human Trafficking Hotline as a bona fide case that had occurred.
The nonprofit responsible for the hotline, Polaris Project, had posted the exact same case details in June of that year as “representative of the types of calls” it received.
Featuring various “names, locations and other identifying information,” the preview was “intended for informational purposes only,” according to an archived web page rated by the Free Beacon.
But Harris copied the example verbatim in the state report, keeping the alias – “Kelly” – of the woman who was trafficked, but moving the location from Washington DC to her native San Francisco.
The 2012 report also used a nearly identical paragraph to a Wikipedia article about California’s Victim Compensation Board.
Another report from 2011, op organized crime the previous year contained passages that corresponded exactly with parts of Lockyer’s report on the same subject six years earlier.
In 2014, Harris apparently stolen of the New York Court of Claims and Albany County Superior Court Judge Roger McDonough for a report on transnational gangs.
Recent polls have shown that Harris is seen as far more honest than her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, but the copycat claims – on top of previous accusations of plagiarism – that public image will certainly be challenged.
The Trump campaign called the veep a political “chameleon” in August, shortly after she clinched the Democratic nomination, for embracing her long-held liberal positions on crime and immigration while rejecting some of the 45th’s proposed policies president embraced.
In April 2007, years before the stolen reports, Harris appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to lobby for passage of the law. John R. Incentive Act for Prosecutors and Defenders – a bill that would have helped local and state prosecutors and public defenders repay their student loans and student loans while performing their public service.
More talented lawyers who opted for high wages at white shoe firms would remain in the public sector if their debts were forgiven, then-San Francisco district attorney argued, retaining more expertise in the offices of prosecutors and public defenders and workforce gaps would be filled. .
Harris’ words during the April 24 hearing were virtually identical to testimony given two months earlier by the Winnebago County, Illinois, Republican, prosecutor Paul Logli also noted, citing the occurrence of the same statistics, punctuation and even typographical errors in both written texts. statements.
In total, according to the newspaper, 1,200 of the 1,500 words Harris spoke (80%) were the same as Logli’s.
Logli told The Post on Tuesday that his testimony was “largely” prepared and written by staff at the National District Attorneys Association (NDAA), where he was then president.
He said Harris, who was a member of the association’s board of directors at the time, likely “also relied on the support of NDAA staff for her opening statement.”
“The similar content of our statements was an effort by the NDAA to be fully consistent in the positions we presented to both Houses of Congress on behalf of the 3,500 state and local plaintiffs we represented nationally,” Logli said in a statement statement by email. “Like me, I believe that Ms. Harris simply relied on NDAA staff for much of the content of her opening statement to Congress.”
Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, revealed last week that portions of Harris’ 2009 pro-criminal justice reform book, “Smart on Crime,” had used identical wording to academic studies, press releases and even a Wikipedia article — all of which were dated from before the publication of the publication. edition.
Harris’ ghostwriter seemed unaware of the apparently plagiarized passages when she contacted The Post — but her publisher later said internally that the allegations were “a very sensitive topic” being handled by higher-ups.
“It wasn’t the ghostwriter’s fault, but rather this is a pattern,” Joshua Lisec, a New York Times best-selling ghostwriter, told The Post in a telephone interview last week, saying he believed Harris probably had “copied and pasted” other things. people’s work and sent it to her ghostwriter without attribution.
“I don’t have access to their specific working relationship from the inside, but from the outside, my lens of the ghostwriting career and profession, knowing how this goes, the ghostwriter probably had no idea that Kamala had probably copied and pasted somewhere in the background of the internet or maybe her assistant,” he said.
‘She has problems with everyone she actually stole [or] stolen from, or whoever did it, but she is liable because her name is on it,” Lisec said of Harris’ theft.
Harris’ ghostwriter, Joan O’C. Hamilton, he added, was “legitimate, experienced and successful as a ghostwriter and not the kind of person you would expect to operate with extremely low standards.”
South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem was widely seen as a potential running mate for Trump before her own mistakes about a “meeting” with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un crept past a ghostwriter in her political memoir No Going Back’, which was published in May.
The Harris campaign and Hamilton did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
