FACT CHECK: JD Vance Claims Kamala Harris Plagiarized Sections Of Her Book

Joseph Casieri | Fact Check Reporter

Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance posted on social media that Vice President Kamala Harris plagiarized her book.

Verdict: True

There have been credible reports that show several instances of what appears to be plagiarism in her 2009 book titled “Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer.”

Fact Check:

Harris participated in an interview with Fox News chief political anchor, Bret Baier,  The New York Times reported. This is her first time Harris has been interviewed on the network, where she stated a potential presidency would “not be a continuation of Biden’s presidency,” Axios reported.

Vance posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, claiming that Harris plagiarized her book from Wikipedia articles. He also shared a photo of Harris holding a microphone.

The post reads, “Hi, I’m JD Vance. I wrote my own book, unlike Kamala Harris, who copied hers from Wikipedia.” (RELATED: Was This Kamala Harris’s First Time Visiting The Border?)

The claim is accurate. The accusation stems from claims made by conservative activist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute Chrisopher Rufo, where he detailed several of the instances of plagiarism on his X account. He shared a comparison of a Wikipedia article and her 2009 book “Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer” shows that several paragraphs bear an extremely close resemblance.

Rufo reported that Harris’s book “contains more than a dozen ‘vicious plagiarism fragments,'” according to an analysis from Austrian academic Dr. Stefan Weber. Weber found passages from Harris’s book called that appears to have lifted passages from Wikipedia and an interview that Martin Luther King Jr. gave, according to The Times.

One example from her book stated, “My mother used to laugh when she told the story about a time I was fussing as a toddler. She leaned down to ask me: ‘Kamala, what’s wrong? What do you want?’ and I wailed back, ‘Fweedom.'”

This is similar to a 1965 Playboy interview. In the interview, King said: “I will never forget a moment in Birmingham when a white policeman accosted a little Negro girl, seven or eight years old, who was walking in a demonstration with her mother. ‘What do you want?’ the policeman asked her gruffly, and the little girl looked him straight in the eye and answered, ‘Fee-dom’.”

She also appears to have lifted a particular section from a Wikipedia article the section of her book reads in part, “The Mid-town Community Court was established as a collaboration between the New York State unified Court System and the Center for Court Innovation. The court works in partnership with local residents, businesses, and social service agencies to organize community service projects and provide on-site social services, including drug treatment, mental health counseling and job training.”

The Wikipedia article that she allegedly plagiarized reads almost identically with the addition of a couple words, “The Mid-town Community Court was established as a collaboration between the New York State unified Court System and the Center for Court Innovation. The court works in partnership with local residents, businesses, and social service agencies in order to organize community service projects and provide on-site social services, including drug treatment, mental health counseling and job training.”

A Harris campaign spokesperson told the New York Times that “[th]is is a book that’s been out for 15 years, and the vice president clearly cited sources and statistics in footnotes and endnotes throughout.”

Check Your Fact contacted Harris asking if she did knowingly plagiarize these sections of her book.

Joseph Casieri

Fact Check Reporter

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