Vice President Kamala Harris and her campaign have been blindsided by yet another major scandal that could impact the outcome of her race against former President Donald Trump. Harris is under scrutiny for allegedly copying a speech, marking another chapter in her plagiarism saga. Earlier this month, reports emerged detailing several instances in which she reportedly used material from various sources without proper attribution. Now, she is also accused of plagiarizing remarks made by a Republican district attorney during congressional testimony in 2007.
A report by The Washington Free Beacon claimed that Harris plagiarized substantial portions of a 2007 congressional testimony from Republican district attorney Paul Logli. An independent investigation by Newsweek confirmed these findings. When Harris, who was then the district attorney of San Francisco, spoke before the House Judiciary Committee in support of a bill aimed at facilitating student loan repayments for state and local prosecutors, she echoed much of Logli’s earlier testimony given to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Harris’s testimony, ostensibly focused on addressing the departure of prosecutors to higher-paying private sector jobs due to burdensome law school debts, closely mirrored around 80% of Logli’s content. This included identical language, structural elements, and even shared typographical errors. The comparison showed that of Harris’s 1,500-word statement, approximately 1,200 words were directly lifted from Logli’s testimony, including entire paragraphs that emphasized the need to retain experienced prosecutors through student loan relief.
Following the release of the report, Logli explained to the Free Beacon, “Kamala Harris represented California state prosecutors as a member of the Board of Directors of NDAA and was testifying in that capacity two months later before the House Judiciary Committee. I believe she also relied on NDAA staff support for her opening statement.”
He remembered that the National District Attorneys Association had researched and written his initial remarks. Logli proposed that the similarity in their statements might have been intentional, saying, “The similar content of our statements was an effort by NDAA to be entirely consistent in the positions we presented to both Houses of Congress on behalf of the 3500 state and local prosecutors we represented on a national level.”
The review by the Washington Free Beacon indicated that Harris allegedly copied significant portions of text from other attorneys and even from Wikipedia without properly crediting the sources. What’s more, most higher education centers forbid students from using Wikipedia because it is often unreliable or incorrect. These instances, which have not been publicly disclosed until now, vary from a few paragraphs to entire pages. Many of these passages appear in official reports released by Harris during her tenure as California’s attorney general.
In another review by the Free Beacon, it was revealed that a particular passage misrepresented a fictionalized account of a sex trafficking victim as an actual case. The narrative, sourced from a nonprofit that operates the National Human Trafficking Hotline, originated from a collection of vignettes published on their website in June 2012. These stories, while illustrative of typical hotline calls, were explicitly intended for informational purposes, not as factual representations. However, in November 2012, Harris included one of these vignettes in a report she released on human trafficking in California. While she credited the story as “courtesy of” the hotline, she reproduced it verbatim without disclosing that the incident was not real.
