JD Vance Responds as Kamala Harris Faces Serious Plagiarism Claims

Vice President Kamala Harris has been accused of plagiarizing portions of her 2009 book Smart on Crime, according to a conservative activist.

"Kamala Harris plagiarized at least a dozen sections of her criminal-justice book, Smart on Crime, according to a new investigation. The current vice president even lifted material from Wikipedia. We have the receipts," activist Christopher Rufo shared on X (formerly Twitter).

Rufo highlighted five examples of the alleged plagiarism.

He claimed the severity of Harris’s actions is "comparable to the plagiarism found in former Harvard president Claudine Gay’s doctoral thesis."

This prompted Ohio Senator and Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance to post his own comment on X.

“Hi, I’m JD Vance. I wrote my own book, unlike Kamala Harris, who copied hers from Wikipedia,” Vance wrote.

Rufo further detailed that Harris wrote Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer while preparing for her campaign to become attorney general of California. The book was co-authored with Joan O’C Hamilton.

Rufo’s investigation included insights from Stefan Weber, “a famed Austrian ‘plagiarism hunter’ who has exposed similar issues in the German-speaking world.” According to Weber, “Harris’s book contains more than a dozen ‘vicious plagiarism fragments.’”

"Some of the passages he highlighted appear to contain minor transgressions—reproducing small sections of text; insufficient paraphrasing—but others seem to reflect more serious infractions, similar in severity to those found in Harvard president Claudine Gay’s doctoral thesis,” Rufo noted.

Rufo alleged that the sources Harris borrowed from included an Associated Press article, a press release from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a Wikipedia entry, a Bureau of Justice Assistance report, and a 2004 Urban Institute study.

"Harris stole long passages directly from Wikipedia—long considered an unreliable source. She not only assumes the online encyclopedia’s accuracy but copies its language nearly verbatim, without citing the source," Rufo explained.

Rufo also pointed out that "Harris seems to have missed critical information and misstated a relevant detail," concluding that “Her reliance on Wikipedia, an unreliable source, led to an unreliable conclusion.”

In conclusion, Rufo asserted that "there is certainly a breach of standards here."

"Harris and her co-author duplicated long passages nearly verbatim without proper citation and without quotation marks, which is the textbook definition of plagiarism," he wrote.

Addressing the possibility of a defense, Rufo added, “Harris, like many other public figures, may have relied entirely on a ghostwriter to draft her book. But that is not exculpatory: Harris, at the end of the day, put her name on the cover."

"One might recall the title of her book: Smart on Crime. There is nothing smart about plagiarism, which is the equivalent of an academic crime. The publisher, as well as the sitting vice president, should retract the plagiarized passages and issue a correction. There should be a single standard—and Kamala Harris is falling short,” Rufo concluded.

In 1987, plagiarism caused a significant scandal that forced President Joe Biden to drop out of the 1988 presidential race. According to The New York Times, Biden admitted to copying a law review article during his first year of law school. Before withdrawing from the race, he also used phrases from a British politician without attribution during a debate, according to The Washington Post.