Kamala Harris Plagiarized Pages of Congressional Testimony From a Republican Colleague

On April 24, 2007, Kamala Harris testified before Congress in support of the John R. Justice Prosecutors and Defenders Incentive Act of 2007. The bill, which was introduced that year but never passed the upper chamber, would have created a student loan repayment program for state and local prosecutors, and Harris, then the district attorney of San Francisco, argued it would draw top legal talent to offices like hers.

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.

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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.

The main difference between their testimonies is that Logli submitted his to the Senate instead of the House. And unlike Harris, Logli is a Republican.

Harris, who also testified about two other bills that day, devoted approximately 1,500 words to the John R. Justice Act. Nearly 1,200 of them—or 80 percent—were copied verbatim from the statement Logli submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee on February 27, 2007, two months before Harris delivered her testimony.

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The passages are some of the most striking cases in which Harris, a former senator and state attorney general, appears to have plagiarized in her capacity as a government official, lifting large chunks of texts from other attorneys—and in one case from Wikipedia—without attribution, according to a Washington Free Beacon review of her work.

The examples have not been previously reported and range from paragraphs to pages. Several appear in reports that Harris published as California attorney general, a post she held for six years and has made a centerpiece of her campaign.

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But as California attorney general, she didn’t just copy boilerplate language without attribution. In one of the lengthier passages reviewed by Free Beacon, she lifted a fictionalized story about a victim of sex trafficking—and presented it as a real case.

The story came from Polaris Project, a nonprofit that runs the National Human Trafficking Hotline. By June 2012, the project had posted a series of vignettes on its website that were “representative of the types of calls” the hotline receives and “meant for informational purposes only,”  according to an archived webpage. To preserve confidentiality, the project said, key details like “names, locations, and other identifying information” had been changed.

But in November 2012, Harris included one of those vignettes in a report she published on the state of human trafficking in California. Though she said that the story was “courtesy of” the hotline, she copied it verbatim and did not acknowledge that it contained fictionalized material.

The only detail she changed was the location. The Polaris Project described a young woman, “Kelly,” who had been forced to engage in prostitution and was rescued by law enforcement in Washington, D.C. But in Harris’s telling, Kelly had conveniently been found in San Francisco.

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