The Washington Free Beacon is out today with an incredible investigation from Aaron Sibarium about Kamala Harris’ history of plagiarism. Had this report appeared in The New York Times about Donald Trump, it would be everywhere.
Last week, we talked briefly about the report from Chris Rufo that outlined how the vice president apparently plagiarized large sections of her 2009 book Smart on Crime. It got virtually no pickup by the mainstream media other than to dismiss it.
The New York Times brought in some experts to say the examples Rufo cited are not very serious. Then, it came out that the reviewers had only been given a small sample of Rufo’s findings. When one of the plagiarism experts saw the full scope, he admitted it was more serious than he initially thought. But the story still got lost in the ether.
Well, in comes the Free Beacon with a brand new host of examples of Kamala Harris outright stealing other people’s work. I will walk you through some of them below, but I encourage you to read the entire investigation here.
Exhibit A: Congressional Testimony
The first example is from 2007 when Harris was the district attorney in San Francisco. She testified before Congress about a bill that would have created a student loan repayment program for state and local prosecutors as an incentive to keep them from leaving public service for high paying law firms.
However, virtually her entire written testimony was lifted from another district attorney in Illinois. His named is Paul Logli, and he happens to be a Republican. The Free Beacon found that the majority of the written statements were identical, even containing the same typos (i.e. missing punctuation, mistaken plurals, etc.) Sibarium discovered one error – a ‘who’ that should have been a ‘whom’ – was corrected.
That is even more damning for her. It is like she went through and tried to clean it up knowing it wasn’t hers and trying to make it sound a little better. But she didn’t change any of the substance and, according to the Free Beacon, 80 percent of Harris’ speech was copied verbatim from Logli.
Exhibit B: Fabricated Cases
The Free Beacon also found an issue with a report Harris released in 2012 when she was attorney general of California on the state of human trafficking in California. The paper touted how many trafficking investigations her office had launched and how many arrests they had made.
Sibarium wrote that one section of the report featured stories about victims of sex trafficking, including a woman named Kelly from San Francisco. Harris’ report claimed Kelly “had lived in a motel where her pimp forced her to engage in prostitution,” but she was able to contact a hotline and local law enforcement helped rescue her from her pimp. The story concluded that “Kelly is currently receiving services and helping law enforcement to pursue a case against her pimp.”
The problem? “Kelly” does not exist and this case did not happen – at least not in San Fransisco. The Free Beacon uncovered that Kelly’s story was actually from Polaris Project, a nonprofit that runs the U.S. National Human Trafficking Hotline. Five months earlier, Polaris had posted a series of stories that it said were “representative of the types of calls they receive.”
When Sibarium compared the text from Polaris Project to the text from Harris’ report, it was virtually unchanged, save for Kelly’s location. Polaris had her in Washington, D.C., while Harris conveniently moved her to San Francisco so she could take credit.
This is unbelievable. She is too lazy to even figure out whether she has a real victim. Sex trafficking victims exist. It is actually not hard to find them. They do call hotlines to get help. But Harris’ office was trying to show that Kelly, as a victim in San Francisco, reached out to the local authorities there to get safety.
Past Problems
There are more examples in the Free Beacon investigation, and they all dovetail with the allegations Chris Rufo made last week. The New York Times yawned at those, writing “conservative activist seizes on passages from Harris’ book” in its headline.
As more examples pile up, will legacy media have to start paying attention? These types of scandals have ruined presidential campaigns before, including that of now-sitting President Joe Biden. When he first ran for president in 1987, the then-senator’s campaign ended after examples of his plagiarism and lies were uncovered. He was accused of lifting phrases from a British lawmaker and Robert F. Kennedy, Sr.
Back then, the legacy media did not let him get away with it, as evidenced by this montage from NewsBusters:
Biden was also accused of lying to voters about his law school career, claiming he was the only student to attend on a “full academic scholarship” and that he graduated “in the top half” of his class. He told voters he was named “the outstanding student in the political science department,” graduated with “three degrees,” and earned “165 credits” when he only needed 123.
None of that was true. In fact, the media found he attended on a partial scholarship, graduated near the bottom of his class, earned one degree, and was not named an outstanding poli sci student. The sitting president is a pathological liar about his own biography, and he chose well for his number two because Kamala Harris appears to have the exact same problem.
What Comes Next?
But does it become an issue for Harris in the way that it once did for Biden? It doesn’t exist as a scandal at all, if the corporate media doesn’t touch it.
Look at the Doug Emhoff story from The Daily Mail. He is accused of abusing the girlfriend he was with prior to Kamala Harris. Where is that reporting? No one has covered it. The media has done a complete blackout of that story even though it was well-sourced with three supporting witnesses and paper receipts.
No, the corporate press is not interested because it has the potential to hurt her.
You can check out Megyn’s full analysis by tuning in to episode 923 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.