Kamala Harris faces new plagiarism scandal

The campaign of Kamala Harris has been rocked by sensational claims she plagiarised Republican congressional testimony as a Senator, and presented a fake sex trafficking story as a real case.

Kamala Harris is facing new claims of plagiarism and inventing a fake human trafficking story in Congressional testimony.

In a scathing investigation by the Washington Free Beacon, the presidential candidate is accused of lifting text “verbatim” from sources ranging from a former Republican colleague to Wikipedia.

It’s the second plagiarism charge against Ms Harris, who was accused last week of copy and pasting large chunks of her book Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer.

She is also newly accused of lifting a fictionalised story about human trafficking that she presented as a real case.

In the most egregious allegation so far, Ms Harris – then San Francisco District Attorney – is accused of lifting almost 1,200 words from the 2007 Congressional testimony of Republican Paul Logli, the District Attorney of Winnebago in Illinois. It represented 80 per cent of her 1,500 word submitted testimony to the House Judiciary Committee in support of the John R. Justice Act, a student loan repayment scheme for prosecutors.

Kamala Harris is facing new allegations of plagiarism, and of presenting a fictionalised story of human trafficking as a real life example of sex slavery in California. Picture: AFP

When she was later attorney general in California, Ms Harris both plagiarised a lengthy fictionalised passage on human trafficking and passed it off as a real example of sex slavery in the United States, according to the new allegations.

The claims were made after a review of Ms Harris’ work by the The Washington Free Beacon, which was the first outlet to reveal irregularities over Ms Harris’ claims that she worked at McDonalds.

Donald Trump trolled Ms Harris’ over the weekend with a highly-viral stunt serving fries at McDonalds, saying he’s worked at the fast food restaurant “15 minutes more” than his opponent in the presidential election.

While Ms Harris insisted she “did fries” at McDonalds, questions over her shifting origin story remain unanswered; including the absence of the job from biographies and statements she later retracted about the job paying her way through college.

Mr Trump is likely to seize on the latest allegations in the final two weeks of the presidential race, particularly the claims Ms Harris used “fake news” in a report she published on human trafficking in California.

In November 2012, Ms Harris is alleged to have used an excerpt from a non-profit National Human Trafficking Hotline that published a series of vignettes “representative of the types of calls” on its website.

The sex trafficking story, from Poalris Project, was “for informational purposes only” and had changed key details like names, locations, and other information.

In that instance, Ms Harris attributed the story as “courtesy of” the hotline, but copied it “verbatim” without acknowledgment the story was fictionalised, according to the Beacon.

While Ms Harris has not publicly responded to the claims, Mr Logli said he didn’t think the copied portions of his testimony were a result of cutting corners at the National District Attorneys Association.

“If the statements were very alike, I don’t think it’s an act of plagiarism as much as it was a case of relying on stuff people who helped write the statement cut and paste,” he told the UK’s Telegraph. “They probably cut corners because they were overstretched.

“They probably should have advised Kamala about what I said before the Senate and they probably should have changed things around, but that’s staff responsibility.”

Originally published as Kamala Harris faces new plagiarism scandal