New evidence released Tuesday suggests Vice President Kamala Harris’s plagiarism scandal is far worse than originally thought.
And it’s very bad timing for Harris, who is struggling in the polls against former President Donald Trump in almost every battleground state.
According to The Washington Free Beacon, Harris’ plagiarism extends beyond her published works and into her official government duties, including congressional testimony and state reports spanning nearly two decades.
The Free Beacon investigation revealed numerous new allegations of plagiarism. The organization reported that in 2007, while serving as San Francisco District Attorney, Harris copied approximately 1,200 words — 80 percent of her Congressional testimony in support of the John R. Justice Prosecutors and Defenders Incentive Act of 2007 — from Republican District Attorney Paul Logli.
Harris seems to have plagiarized Logli’s earlier statement supporting the Act so shamelessly, the copied testimony even contained identical typos and punctuation errors.
“There are numerous criminal cases that are particularly difficult because of the dynamics involved,” Harris wrote to the House Judiciary Committee — Logli’s exact words.
“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.”
The investigation uncovered other instances of alleged plagiarism in Harris’s official reports as California Attorney General. In a 2012 human trafficking report, Harris presented a fictionalized story from the Polaris Project as a real case, changing only the location from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco without acknowledging that story was fiction, not fact.
Her 2014 report on international criminal gangs contained passages copied verbatim from New York State Judge Roger McDonough, including his footnotes.
A 2010 report on organized crime lifted entire sections from her predecessor Bill Lockyer’s reports, and her 2012 human trafficking report included a paragraph copied directly from Wikipedia.
This isn’t just a pattern of minor infractions, but a major blow to the credibility of the District Attorney’s office that needs public confidence to land critical convictions in a court of law.
“Being a state’s top lawyer is a real responsibility. It requires attention to detail,” Former Arizona Solicitor General O.H. Skinner told the Free Beacon. “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.”
These revelations follow recent allegations about plagiarism in Harris’s 2009 book “Smart on Crime,” first reported by Christopher Rufo.
While the Harris campaign dismissed those claims as right-wing attacks. But they have not responded to requests for comment about these serious new allegations involving official government documents.
The timing of the plagiarism scandal is particularly significant, coming just weeks before Election Day in what polls show is an extremely tight race with former President Donald Trump.