Expert says Harris plagiarism allegations ‘more serious’ than he initially told the NYTimes

CV NEWS FEED // A plagiarism expert who served as The New York Times’ consultant on the matter said this week that the extent to which Democratic nominee Kamala Harris plagiarized sections of her 2009 book is “more serious” than he had initially told the Times.

Reports that Harris and her co-author lifted multiple passages that appear in their nonfiction book “Smart on Crime” circulated on Monday after scholar Christopher Rufo posted alleged photographic evidence to X (formerly Twitter) and penned a Substack post detailing the allegations.

As CatholicVote noted that day, the allegations stem from a “study conducted by a world-renowned plagiarism detection expert” Dr. Stefan Weber.

On Tuesday, the day after Rufo broke the story, Times plagiarism consultant Jonathan Bailey published an article on Plagiarism Today (PT), a website that he created and runs.

Bailey wrote that on Monday, shortly after Rufo made his posts, “the New York Times called me and asked me to examine those five publicly available passages” – the ones featured in Rufo’s X thread.

“I studied the passages and found that they were indicators of poor writing processes but did not make up a large portion of the work” and “are relatively minor as far as plagiarism goes,” Bailey wrote.

>> MONDAY: HARRIS ALLEGED TO HAVE PLAGIARIZED PARTS OF BOOK <<

However, he was not asked to look at many other alleged instances of plagiarism Harris committed throughout the book.

“At the time,” Bailey continued,

I was unaware of a full dossier with additional allegations, which led some to accuse the New York Times of withholding that information from me. However, the article clearly stated that it was my “initial reaction” to those allegations, not a complete analysis.  

Today, I reviewed the complete dossier prepared by Dr. Stefan Weber, whom I have covered before. I also performed a peer review of one of his papers in 2018.  

“With this new information, while I believe the case is more serious than I commented to the New York Times, the overarching points remain,” he said, later noting that the full dossier “contains approximately 29 accusations” against Harris and her co-author.

“While there are problems with this work, the pattern points to sloppy writing habits, not a malicious intent to defraud,” Bailey added. “Is it problematic? Yes. But it’s also not the wholesale fraud that many have claimed it to be. It sits somewhere between what the two sides want it to be.”

“This is stunning,” Rufo wrote on X (formerly Twitter). He stated that Bailey’s new revelation suggests “that the paper deliberately withheld the full Kamala Harris plagiarism report from him.”

FOX News reported:

In a New York Times article dissecting the claims, Bailey claimed the examples amounted “to an error and not an intent to defraud.” He accused conservative activist Chris Rufo, who reported the story, of taking minor infractions and trying to “make a big deal of it.”

Shortly after the Monday Times article was published, Bailey wrote on X: “For those coming here from the NY Times Article. I want to be clear that I have NOT performed a full analysis of the book.”

“My quotes were based on information provided to me by the reporters and spoke only about those passages,” he emphasized.

In a subsequent X post, Rufo explained that the Times’ possible withholding of the full dossier of allegations is part of a larger trend of mainstream media sources coming to Harris’ aid:

ABC does fake fact-checks to help Kamala. CBS stealth-edits an interview to help Kamala. New York Times withholds evidence to help Kamala. This is endemic—and only visible now because we have X.

“When the Times published its piece, I called the reporter and the editor to protest that they withheld evidence from their supposed ‘expert,’” Rufo continued on X.

“The editor, Mary Suh, gave me the excuse that it wasn’t their job to review the whole report,” he recounted. “I hung up on her.”

Harris’ team has responded to the plagiarism allegations against the candidate by denouncing them as “politically charged.”

Harris campaign Rapid Response Advisor James Singer stated: “Rightwing operatives are getting desperate as they see the bipartisan coalition of support Vice President Harris is building to win this election.”

“This is a book that’s been out for 15 years, and the Vice President clearly cited sources and statistics in footnotes and endnotes throughout,” Singer claimed.