NEW: Kamala plagiarized at least 12 sections of her book 'Smart on Crime': report

It has been reported that Democratic presidential nominee and current US Vice President Kamala Harris plagiarized at least a dozen sections of her criminal justice book "Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer." The revelations may come as an "October surprise" as is often talked about as the 2024 presidential candidates near election time.  

According to journalist Christopher Rufo, Harris "plagiarized at least a dozen sections of her criminal-justice book, Smart on Crime, according to a new investigation," and added, "The current vice president even lifted material from Wikipedia." 

In the report, Rufo cites multiple instances of apparent plagiarism from the current vice president in her book, citing famed "plagiarism hunter" Stefan Weber. Weber has taken down politicians in the German speaking world for written work that they have done. Weber told Rufo that Harris' book has over a dozen “vicious plagiarism fragments," or places where she lifted passages of text and did not give proper attribution.  

In one section, Harris apparently lifted a section from a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release. She published the language and passed it off as her own in the book without citation or attribution. She did so similarly with an uncited NBC News report regarding high school graduation rates. 

Harris also took passages directly from a Wikipedia page, according to the report. She copied language in its near entirety as the passage appeared in 2008 about a New York Court program, when the Democratic nominee was writing the book. This copy and paste from Wikipedia, long considered to be an unreliable source for scholarly information, led her to cite a figure incorrectly just as was made in the Wikipedia article at the time.