Kamala Harris plagiarized 2007 House Judiciary Committee testimony: report

Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris has a history of apparent plagiarism, according to a report Tuesday from The Washington Free Beacon that examined numerous examples of the practice in Harris’ career from her time as the DA of San Francisco onwards.

On April 24, 2007, Harris testified before Congress to lend her support to the John R. Justice Prosecutors and Defenders Incentive Act of 2007. In a written statement to the House Judiciary Committee, Harris said prosecutors working for the public good often give up and seek a private legal practice because they need money to pay off their education bills. "There are numerous criminal cases that are particularly difficult because of the dynamics involved," Harris wrote. "To name just a few—child abuse, elder neglect, domestic violence, identity theft and public corruption. The stakes are simply too high to allow any attorney other than experienced prosecutors to handle these matters."

But according to The Free Beacon, all of her arguments and virtually all of her words were lifted from another district attorney, Paul Logli of Winnebago County, Illinois, who had also supported the bill before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Both statements are almost identical – up to the typos and grammatical errors.

It is one example cited by The Free Beacon of Harris’ apparently reckless use of plagiarism that the media outlet maintains has been consistent throughout her career “and range from paragraphs to pages.”

"Being a state's top lawyer is a real responsibility," said O.H. Skinner, Arizona’s former solicitor general. "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."

With the presidential election just two weeks away, accusations of plagiarism would not blend with the narrative that Harris promotes of her work as a prosecutor who had the guts, determination and integrity to pursue the sexual predators of children.

But, according to The Free Beacon, Harris actually borrowed a fictionalized story about a sex trafficking victim and pretended it was reality. The story came from Polaris Project, the nonprofit behind the National Human Trafficking Hotline. By June 2012, it had posted some vignettes on its website, "representative of the types of calls" it was receiving and "meant for informational purposes only," But in November 2012, Harris presented one of those vignettes in a published report on human trafficking in California. Although Harris acknowledged the subject matter had come from the hotline, she simply replicated the text and didn’t even bother to mention that it was a fictionalized account.

The Free Beacon says there is at least one other example from this time in her career. She wrote a 2010 report on organized crime where Harris reportedly took numerous uncredited portions from Bill Lockyer, who had been a former California attorney general. These latest claims buttress the arguments made by conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who said he found incidents of plagiarism in Harris’s 2009 book Smart on Crime, The Free Beacon noted.

The media outlet said, after a thorough review of her work, that it has “found a more extensive pattern of plagiarism than has been previously reported. It spans five publications, including her sworn congressional testimony.” It noted that the charges of plagiarism might be emblematic of the problems that many voters have with the Harris campaign for the presidency: that her team and her have “few ideas of [their] own.”