From [HERE] In 2009, Kamala Harris co-authored a book called Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer. Its purpose was to outline her criminal justice policies in advance of her campaign for California attorney general.

The book has attracted the attention of conservative writer and activist Christopher Rufo, who contends that Harris and co-author Joan O'C. Hamilton plagiarized several passages. Rufo's analysis—which relies on the work of Stefan Weber, a noted exposer of plagiarism—finds that there are at least 12 sections of the book in which sentences or entire paragraphs were copied from another source without proper attribution.

"Taken in total, there is certainly a breach of standards here," writes Rufo. "Harris and her co-author duplicated long passages nearly verbatim without proper citation and without quotation marks, which is the textbook definition of plagiarism. They not only lifted material from sources without proper attribution, but in at least one case, relied on a low-quality source, which potentially undermined the accuracy of their conclusion."

Readers may disagree about the severity of some aspects of the plagiarism: Harris borrowing from her own work or not paraphrasing sufficiently. But there are more striking examples of entire passages being lifted from other sources without citation. This is definitely a no-no, and meets the standard definition of plagiarism. [MORE]