Kamala Harris embroiled in plagiarism row

US vice president appears to copy Martin Luther King in an anecdote from her childhood during the civil rights movement

Kamala Harris has been accused of plagiarising Martin Luther King in the book that helped launch her political career. 
The US vice president is accused of copying a more than a dozen sections of Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. 
She appears to borrow from Rev Dr King in an anecdote from her childhood during the civil rights movement.
The 59-year-old wrote: “My mother used to laugh when she told the story about a time I was fussing as a toddler: She leaned down to ask me, “Kamala, what’s wrong? What do you want?” and I wailed back, “Fweedom.”
The story is very similar to one shared by the civil rights leader, as the New York Post and other outlets have previously noted.
“I will never forget a moment in Birmingham when a white policeman accosted a little Negro girl, seven or eight years old, who was walking in a demonstration with her mother,” King told Playboy magazine in 1965.
“‘What do you want?’ the policeman asked her gruffly, and the little girl looked at him straight in the eye and answered, ‘Fee-dom’,”.
Stefan Weber, an Austrian academic dubbed the “plagiarism hunter”, reviewed the book and accused the Democratic presidential nominee of dozens of instances of lifting passages without appropriate citation. 
The plagiarism in Ms Harris’s book ranges from “minor transgressions” to more “serious infractions”, according to Dr Weber.
The academic identified lengthy passages on a New York City community court initiative based in midtown Manhattan which appeared to have been copied and pasted from Wikipedia.
At other points, he argued she had lifted statistics on high school graduation rates from an Associated Press report published by NBC News without attribution.
He also highlighted striking similarities between passages in her book and articles produced by other news outlets.
Some paragraphs appear to have been cribbed from press releases put out by Ms Harris’s own office highlighting her successful prosecutions, and including “misleading embellishments”.
The claims were swiftly seized on by Ms Harris’s Republican rivals.
JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, shared a link to the findings, saying: “Kamala didn’t even write her own book!”
Donald Jr, Trump’s eldest son, said the allegations offered “more evidence that Kamala Harris is a fraud”.
Ms Harris co-authored the book with Joan O’C Hamilton, a professional collaborator, early in her political career as she attempted to establish a profile for herself as a young prosecutor in California. It was released in 2009, while she was the district attorney of San Francisco.
It served as something of a policy manifesto, sharing her insights from her time as a career prosecutor to her suggestions to reform the system to “end the cycle of repeat offenders”.
“Harris shatters the old distinctions rooted in false choices and myths. She presents practical solutions for making the criminal justice system truly—not just rhetorically—tough,” the blurb from her publisher stated.
It formed part of the springboard for her successful campaign to become attorney general of California the following year.
Dr Weber’s findings were shared in a joint investigation with Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who previously made claims against the now-ousted Harvard University president, Claudine Gay.
In his report, the Austrian academic wrote: “What do these findings say about Kamala Harris? Is she in part fake? Did her ghostwriter plagiarise? Was it just the team behind her? I have no idea. I let other people from the US draw the right conclusions.”
His investigations have previously focused on academics and German politicians and secured him an international profile. Some of those he has accused of plagiarism have later been cleared.
A New York Times profile on Dr Weber described how his critics have come to see him as “a persnickety crusader who takes pleasure in character assassination”.
Professor Peter Bruck, his former mentor, told the newspaper that Dr Weber had gone from serving as “a useful tracker” and “transformed into an illegitimate detractor”.
The Telegraph has contacted Ms Harris’s campaign for comment.