As Germany’s current minister for foreign affairs Annalena Baerbock, also Kamala Harris did plagiarize in a book, namely in „Smart on Crime“ (2009).
My credo always was: If you think you have to say so much that it is worth an entire book, please say it in your own words. If not, please cite correctly. But Kamala Harris did plagiarize a section from a Wikipedia article and obviously also faked a childhood story which she „borrowed“ from Martin Luther King.
And there is more plagiarism in the book. As we finished the first round of our in-depth investigation, we found 18 fragments of plagiarism. Meanwhile, we count 27. We found typical „pawn sacrifice plagiarism“ (just a part of the whole appropriated text is cited) and also self-plagiarism/self-recycling (which could also be seen as benign, while plagiarizing from other authors is clearly vicious). 24 fragments are plagiarism from other authors, 3 fragments are self-plagiarism from a work written with a co-author.
The wondrous migration of text chunks in interviews
Kamala Harris also gave a „live“ interview which in parts consisted of a prior interview for another media which in turn contains many verbatim text chunks from her book. Some say this is rather common in the US (call it content syndication?), but I would never have the idea to simply copy and paste paragraphs from my current book when I am interviewed on the topic of my book. For my standards, it is also unethical to reproduce text chunks from an older interview verbatim in a newer one. Different media should have different content. In sum, it seems to be a rather „cheap“ way of producing content.
No cent received for our documentation
Believe it or not, we did this documentation driven by scientific interest and did not get a penny for it (the same as with the plagiarism cases of Annalena Baerbock and Diana Kinnert in Germany). In contrary, we had expenses. As always, we do that to uncover the problematic rise of the copy-paste-culture.
What do these findings say about Kamala Harris? Is she in part fake? Did her ghostwriter plagiarize? Was it just the team behind her? I have no idea. I let other people from the US draw the right conclusions.
Here is the full documentation as a PDF-File (49 pages). And here it is page by page in my blog:
