SO THAT’S WHY JOE BIDEN TAPPED KAMALA AS VEEP: Christopher Rufo on “Kamala Harris’s Plagiarism Problem. The vice president appears to have airlifted sections of her book, Smart on Crime.”

To her supporters, the vice president’s rhetorical flourishes represent the values of compassion and optimism. To her detractors, her reliance on platitudes and tautologies demonstrates her unfitness for the presidency.

But, as we have discovered in this exclusive report, another element appears to exist within Kamala Harris’s rhetorical universe: plagiarism.

At the beginning of Harris’s political career, in the run-up to her campaign to serve as California’s attorney general, she and co-author Joan O’C Hamilton published a small volume, entitled Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. The book helped to establish her credibility on criminal-justice issues.

However, according to Stefan Weber, a famed Austrian “plagiarism hunter” who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world, Harris’s book contains more than a dozen “vicious plagiarism fragments.” Some of the passages he highlighted appear to contain minor transgressions—reproducing small sections of text; insufficient paraphrasing—but others seem to reflect more serious infractions, similar in severity to those found in Harvard president Claudine Gay’s doctoral thesis. (Harris did not respond to a request for comment.)

No word yet if Neil Kinnock will be endorsing her, as he did Joe Biden.

Meanwhile, a well-known Republican is pouncing and/or seizing in response:

UPDATE: The New York Post called Hamilton after Rufo’s story broke, leading to this terse exchange:

“Oh gosh,” Harris’ ghostwriter told The Post over the phone shortly after the allegations were published.

“I haven’t seen anything,” she added. “I’m afraid I can’t talk to you right now, though, I’m in the middle of something. Let me go try to figure that out.”

I doubt the paper is waiting for a call back.

UPDATE (6:48 PM): I did the “pouncing and/or seizing” joke above about Vanz, but the New York Times actually does the meme for real about Rufo! Sad Trombone: The New York Times Is Not Handling the Kamala Harris Plagiarism News Well at All:

The Gray Lady’s then-ombudsman confirmed the paper’s leftist bias way back in 2004, but by employing the “conservative activist seizes” headline, it’s good to see the Times remind its readers of its ideology twenty years later. As well as reminding them that paper exists to protect Democratic Party candidates, not break actual news about them.