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The New York Times admitted that the vice president plagiarized multiple passages from her book, then immediately moved to downplay it.

On Monday, the outlet responded to allegations from Christopher Rufo that Vice President Kamala Harris “plagiarized at least a dozen sections of her criminal-justice book, Smart on Crime” including reportedly lifting material from Wikipedia.

The Times headlined the article “Conservative Activist Seizes on Passages From Harris Book” and brought in a “plagiarism expert” to assure readers that it’s not that serious.

“The passages called into question by Mr. Rufo on his Substack platform involve about 500 words in the approximately 65,000-word, 200-page book,” the report reads. “Ms. Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, wrote the book with another author when she was the district attorney in San Francisco.”

“In a review of the book, The New York Times found that none of the passages in question took the ideas or thoughts of another writer, which is considered the most serious form of plagiarism. Instead, the sentences copy descriptions of programs or statistical information that appear elsewhere,” it continues.

Later in the article, the expert is trotted out to say that given the sheer size of the written work, a few plagiarized words aren’t that big of a deal.

“Jonathan Bailey, a plagiarism consultant in New Orleans and the publisher of Plagiarism Today, said on Monday that his initial reaction to Mr. Rufo’s claims was that the errors were not serious, given the size of the document.”

Once the deflection portion of the report was done, The Times shifted its focus to Rufo.

“Mr. Rufo is part of a loose confederation of conservative writers and activists who, during the past year, have tried to expose plagiarism among academics, many of whom have been Black scholars who work in the field of diversity and inclusion. … Some academics … have characterized the campaign as racist,” they wrote.

Republican Vice Presidential nominee J.D. Vance managed to find some humor in the situation:

Sierra Marlee
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