Vice President Kamala Harris has been accused of plagiarizing portions of a 2007 congressional testimony from a Republican district attorney, according to a report by The Washington Free Beacon.
Newsweek conducted an independent review of the allegations and confirmed The Washington Free Beacon’s findings. Most of Harris’ 1,500-word testimony was copied from a statement by Paul Logli, the district attorney of Winnebago County, Illinois, with only minor additions and changes.
In April 2007, Harris, then-district attorney of San Francisco, testified before the House Judiciary Committee in support of the John R. Justice Prosecutors and Defenders Incentive Act, a bill aimed to offer student loan repayment to state and local prosecutors to help retain legal talent.
In a written statement, she said that many prosecutors, burdened by law school debt, leave for better-paying jobs in the private sector after a few years. This has left district attorneys’ offices short-staffed, forcing inexperienced attorneys to take on complex cases.
While Harris’ statement was concise and pragmatic, 80 percent of it closely matched Logli’s testimony, which he delivered to the Senate Judiciary Committee two months earlier on the same issue. The two statements shared similar language, structure, and even the same typographical errors.
Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, answers questions at the Royal Oak Music Theatre on October 21, 2024 in Royal Oak, Michigan. Harris has been accused of plagiarizing portions of a 2007 congressional testimony from a Republican district attorney, according to a report by The Washington Free Beacon.
Photo by Sarah Rice/Getty Images
Our review confirms the findings reported by The Washington Free Beacon. After comparing both documents, we found that nearly 1,200 of the 1,500 words in Harris’ written statement were copied from Logli’s testimony, including entire paragraphs advocating for student loan relief to retain experienced prosecutors in public service.
“There are numerous criminal cases that are particularly difficult because of the dynamics involved,” Harris said—a statement nearly identical to Logli’s testimony. Both statements argued that student loan forgiveness was crucial for keeping experienced prosecutors in public service, citing the same data and making the same points in the same order.
Logli, a Republican, submitted his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in February 2007, while Harris delivered hers to the House Judiciary Committee in April of that year. Despite being presented to different chambers of Congress, the testimonies were strikingly similar. Harris’ statement contained only a few additional paragraphs, which did little to disguise the broader similarities.
Paul Logli, who retired in 2021, has not publicly commented on the matter. Newsweek reached out to the Harris campaign for a response to the plagiarism allegations.
The Washington Free Beacon also highlighted a report on human trafficking during Harris’ time as California attorney general, where she included a case study that was later revealed to be fictional. The case, which described a young woman forced into prostitution and rescued by law enforcement, was sourced from the Polaris Project, a nonprofit that runs the National Human Trafficking Hotline.
However, Harris presented the story as if it had occurred in California, while the original account was a fictionalized example from Washington, D.C., created for illustrative purposes. Additionally, the report found that Harris had copied a paragraph directly from Wikipedia without proper attribution.
Other plagiarism accusations
The Vice President has previously faced plagiarism accusations, including claims that her 2009 book Smart on Crime contained material lifted from other sources without proper attribution.
The allegations resurfaced Monday when conservative activist Christopher Rufo posted an article on Substack, listing several passages he said were copied from other sources without any or adequate attribution.
Rufo cited a report written by Dr. Stefan Weber, an Austrian self-described “plagiarism hunter,” which allegedly found that Harris and co-author Joan O’C Hamilton had 27 “fragments of plagiarism” in the book. The 49-page report further claims that portions of the book were directly lifted from various Wikipedia articles.
Ohio Senator and Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance took the opportunity to send a jab to Harris over the resurfaced plagiarism allegations. In an October 14 tweet, Vance wrote, “Hi, I’m JD Vance. I wrote my own book, unlike Kamala Harris, who copied hers from Wikipedia.”
Smart on Crime, a 248-page book, was written in the run-up to Harris’ campaign for California attorney general. According to its description, the book “shatters the old distinctions rooted in false choices and myths” and “presents practical solutions for making the criminal justice system truly—not just rhetorically—tough.”
Harris’ campaign dismissed the allegations as a last-ditch effort by Republicans to stunt her momentum three weeks before Election Day.
“Right-wing 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.
Plagiarism experts and academics who reviewed the claims said several were benign or could not be proven, and others were more due to careless writing than malicious intent.
Jonathan Bailey, a consultant and publisher of Plagiarism Today, said in a Tuesday post that while some passages, like those from Wikipedia, are sloppy and negligent, the context and citations suggest negligence is more likely than malice.
“The pattern fits what is, unfortunately, a common practice for many writers. It involves pasting in outside work to edit it later to make it “original,” Bailey says in a blog post published Tuesday.
Miguel Roig, a psychology professor at St. John’s University in New York who studies plagiarism, said to the Associated Press that the lapses described by Weber fit the definition of plagiarism, the problematic passages amount to a small total of the overall book and “hardly seems like an attempt to defraud.”
The plagiarism accusations against Harris are not new but have resurfaced at a crucial time, with the 2024 election approaching. History shows that such scandals can have consequences—her boss, President Joe Biden, withdrew from the 1987 Democratic primary after being accused of copying a speech from a British politician.
