Now the news comes out about more Kamala Harris plagiarism. This time it involved testimony she gave to Congress in a written statement back in 2007:

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. …

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.

If you’re going to plagiarize, you may as well do it up right.

The graphics at the article are impressive. There’s more, too – Harris was also “repackaging stories from other locations as though they happened in California.” And “In a 2010 report on organized crime, Harris copied several passages from Bill Lockyer, one of her predecessors as California attorney general, without attribution.”

It’s become much easier to do that sort of thing with the advent of personal computers. However, it’s also become easier to locate instances of plagiarism.

What else has Kamala been up to? Well, there’s this oopsie involving her law school admission and first year:

Harris was admitted [to Hastings Law School] under a program called LEOP. According to the University:

“UC Hastings created the Legal Education Opportunity Program (LEOP) in 1969 to make an outstanding legal education accessible to those who come from disadvantaged economic and educational backgrounds.

“Students are encouraged to submit a “separate LEOP statement describing the adversity they faced and its impact on their academic preparedness for law school.”

A Politico article from 2021 also referenced this part of Harris’ law school experience:

She was part of the pre-orientation Legal Education Opportunity Program (LEOP), which had been founded in 1969 to help law students from disadvantaged communities navigate the stringent demands of the first-year curriculum. Harris had come to a predominantly white institution after four years at a historically Black university. Beyond introducing students to Socratic pedagogy, case-briefing and exam-taking, the pre-orientation also gave students of color a sense of community and a hamlet of solidarity in a cut-throat environment.

So, what was Harris’ disadvantage? It seems from that paragraph that it was having gone to a black 4-year college? But Howard is the most famous black college of all, and I think it had a pretty good reputation back then. Isn’t it racist to consider a degree from Howard a disadvantage that wouldn’t have prepared its graduates properly? Or perhaps the idea is that being black at “a predominantly white institution” automatically constituted a disadvantage in the eyes of Hastings? Nowhere is there a hint about Harris’ dual heritage being Indian, but that possibly factored into it as well.

When these things occurred, I doubt Harris expected this level of scrutiny years later.