Plagiarism expert: Harris book shows 'sloppy writing habits,' not 'wholesale fraud'

Plagiarism expert Jonathan Bailey said Vice President Harris’s 2009 book showed signs of “sloppy writing habits” but pushed back on claims that the Democratic nominee engaged in “wholesale fraud.”

In an article published Tuesday in Plagiarism Today, Bailey expanded on his initial remarks to The New York Times in response to conservative author Christopher Rufo’s article accusing Harris of plagiarism in her book, “Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer.”

Rufo’s article included five sections of the book, which, Bailey said, “bore strong similarities to earlier works.” Bailey said he now had the chance to examine the more complete dossier by an Austrian plagiarism expert, Stefan Weber.

“With this new information, while I believe the case is more serious than I commented to The New York Times, the overarching points remain,” Bailey said in his Tuesday article. “While there are problems with this work, the pattern points to sloppy writing habits, not a malicious intent to defraud."

“Is it problematic? Yes. But it’s also not the wholesale fraud that many have claimed it to be. It sits somewhere between what the two sides want it to be,” Bailey said.

The updated analysis from Bailey comes as Rufo’s plagiarism accusations against the Democratic presidential nominee gain traction online and in conservative media circles.

Rufo reported on five of the approximately 18 accusations of plagiarism that Weber’s dossier makes against Harris’s 2009 book. Rufo, late last year, made accusations of plagiarism against then-Harvard President Claudine Gay, who was under scrutiny at the time for her remarks at a congressional hearing about antisemitism. She resigned from her post soon thereafter.

The Harris campaign dismissed the accusations as a concerted effort by “rightwing operatives,” in a statement reported by USA Today.

“Rightwing operatives are getting desperate as they see the bipartisan coalition of support Vice President Harris is building to win this election,” Harris campaign spokesperson James Singer said in a statement, according to the national news outlet.

“This is a book that’s been out for 15 years, and the Vice President clearly cited sources and statistics in footnotes and endnotes throughout,” he added in the statement.

The Hill has reached out to the Harris campaign for comment.

Bailey, in his essay this week, said the most serious allegation was one instance in which Harris’s book “contained roughly two paragraphs copied from Wikipedia without citation.”

“To be clear, that is plagiarism,” Bailey continued.

He said the remaining examples were instances when the book allegedly failed to use quotation marks around words that were cited verbatim. Bailey said the sources “were largely cited and, in some cases, were quoted, though not all verbatim text was included.”

He said the alleged failure to cite sources from the time the book was written is relatively common, saying, “We’ve seen this problem repeatedly, especially with works from this period.”

“Poor writing techniques and the lack of accessible plagiarism detection tools made this a common problem, especially before the 2010s. While that doesn’t make it acceptable, it makes it more about sloppy writing habits than an intent to defraud,” he wrote.