New claims of plagiarism emerged Tuesday against Vice President Kamala Harris — with allegations including that she fabricated a story about sex trafficking and cribbed the work of other prosecutors, a judge and even Wikipedia to draft state reports on crime.
Harris, 60, seems to have invented details of a sex crime case out of whole cloth and taken sentences directly from published work by former California Attorney General Bill Lockyer as well as a New York jurist.
The new allegations were first reported by the Washington Free Beacon.
In a 2012 report on human trafficking Harris issued while California’s attorney general, she cited a fictional example of the type of call received by the National Human Trafficking Hotline as a bona fide case that had occurred.
The nonprofit in charge of 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.
With different “names, locations, and other identifying information,” the example was “meant for informational purposes only,” according to an archived webpage reviewed by the Free Beacon.
But Harris copied the example verbatim into the state report, keeping the alias — “Kelly” — of the woman who was being trafficked but shifting the venue from Washington, D.C., to her native San Francisco.
The 2012 report also used a nearly identical paragraph to a Wikipedia entry on California’s Victim Compensation Board.
Another report put out in 2011, on organized crime the previous year, contained passages that were an exact match for portions of Lockyer’s report on the same subject six years earlier.
In 2014, Harris apparently stole from New York Court of Claims and Albany County Superior Court Judge Roger McDonough for a report on transnational gangs.
Recent polling has shown that Harris is seen as far more honest than her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, but the copycat claims — on top of earlier plagiarism allegations — is sure to test that public image.
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The Trump campaign dubbed the veep a political “chameleon” in August, shortly after she clinched the Democratic nomination, for flip-flopping on her long-held liberal stances related to crime and immigration while embracing some of the 45th president’s proposed policies.
In April 2007, years before the purloined reports, Harris appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to lobby for passage of the John R. Justice Prosecutors and Defenders Incentive Act — a bill that would have helped local and state prosecutors and public defenders repay their law school and undergraduate loans while performing their public service.
More talented lawyers who opted for high pay at white-shoe firms would remain in the public sector if their debt was forgiven, the then-San Francisco DA argued, keeping more expertise in prosecutors and public defenders’ offices and helping to fill gaps in staffing.
Harris’ words in the April 24 hearing were nearly identical to testimony given two months prior by Republican Winnebago County, Ill., prosecutor Paul Logli, the Free Beacon also noted, citing the occurrence of the same statistics, punctuation and even typos in both written statements.
In total, the outlet said, 1,200 of the 1,500 words spoken by Harris (80%) were the same as those uttered by Logli.
Logli told The Post Tuesday that his testimony was prepared and written “largely” by staff from the National District Attorneys Association (NDAA), where he was then serving as president.
He said that Harris, who was a member of the association’s board of directors at the time, likely “also relied on NDAA staff support for her opening statement.”
“The similar content of our statements was an effort by NDAA to be entirely consistent in the positions we presented to both Houses of Congress on behalf of the 3,500 state and local prosecutors we represented on a national level,” Logli said in an emailed statement. “Like me, I believe Ms. Harris simply relied on NDAA staff for much of the content of her opening statement before Congress.”
Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo revealed last week that portions of Harris’ 2009 pro-criminal justice reform book, “Smart on Crime,” had used identical wording to academic studies, press reports and even a Wikipedia entry — all of which predated the publication’s release.
Harris’ ghostwriter seemed unaware of the apparently plagiarized passages when contacted by The Post — but her publisher later signaled internally that the accusations were “a very sensitive topic” that was being handled by higher-ups.
“It was not the ghostwriter’s fault but, rather, this is a pattern,” Joshua Lisec, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter, told The Post in a phone interview last week, saying he believed that Harris had probably “copied and pasted” other people’s work and sent it off to her ghostwriter without attribution.
“I don’t have inside access to their particular working relationship, but from the outside, my lens of the ghostwriting career and the profession, knowing how this goes, the ghostwriter probably had no idea that likely Kamala copied and pasted from somewhere on the internet or maybe her assistant did,” he said.
“She’s in trouble with everybody that she has effectively stolen [or] stolen from, or whoever did it, but she’s liable because her name is is on it,” Lisec said of Harris’ pilfering.
Harris’ ghostwriter, Joan O’C. Hamilton, he added, was “legitimate, experienced, successful as a ghostwriter and not the sort of person that you would expect engages with extremely low standards.”
South Dakota GOP Gov. Kristi Noem was widely viewed as a potential running mate pick for Trump before her own errors about a “meeting” with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un crept past a ghostwriter into her political memoir “No Going Back,” which was published in May.
The Harris campaign and Hamilton did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
