NEIL KINNOCK SMILES: Kamala Harris Plagiarized Pages of Congressional Testimony From a Republican Colleague. Plus, a Fictionalized Story About Human Trafficking.
In a written statement to the House Judiciary Committee, she described how debt-addled prosecutors often decamp to the private sector a few years into the job, lured by the prospect of higher pay that could be used to pay off law school debt. That dynamic had left many district attorneys’ offices short-staffed, she said, forcing them to put rookie attorneys on complex cases.
“There are numerous criminal cases that are particularly difficult because of the dynamics involved,” Harris wrote. “To name just a few—child abuse, elder neglect, domestic violence, identity theft and public corruption. The stakes are simply too high to allow any attorney other than experienced prosecutors to handle these matters.”
By repaying the loans of prosecutors and public defenders, Harris argued, the bill, which had been introduced with bipartisan support, would provide an incentive for lawyers to enter public service, or at least diminish the incentive to leave it.
The statement was simple and pragmatic. But Harris wasn’t the first person to make it.
Virtually her entire testimony about the bill was taken from that of another district attorney, Paul Logli of Winnebago County, Illinois, who had testified in support of the legislation two months earlier before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Both statements cite the same surveys, use the same language, and make the same points in the same order, with a paragraph added here or there. They even contain the same typos, such as missing punctuation or mistaken plurals. One error—a “who” that should have been a “whom”—was corrected in Harris’s transposition.
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The plagiarism could become a potent symbol of that critique in the last days of a dead heat. In an article about Rufo’s allegations, the New York Times noted that “none of the passages in question took the ideas or thoughts of another writer.” The new examples—in which Harris lifts pages of original material from other lawyers—undermine that defense and suggest that not all the passages were copied in error. Some contain tell-tale signs of intent, such as small tweaks in punctuation and the removal of minor details.
The symbolism could be especially resonant given that Logli, who has been donating to GOP candidates since 1994, is not the only Republican Harris has been accused of parroting. She endured a different sort of plagiarism scandal in August when she promised to eliminate taxes on tips—two months after her rival, Donald Trump, had promised to do the same.
“This was a TRUMP idea,” Trump fumed on Truth Social at the time. “She has no ideas, she can only steal from me.”
Well, not just from Trump, apparently. Oh and regarding the second half of the headline above:
(Classical reference in headline.)