Apparently, Donald Trump has a penchant for plagiarists. First, it was wife Melania, now it’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications Monica Crowley being accused of plagiarism.
As we reported in 2004, allegations of Crowley plagiarism go back to 1999 when Slate noticed that a “Nixon apologia” she wrote for the Wall Street Journal bore “striking similarities in phraseology” to someone else’s work. That last quote came from an editor’s note a few days later in the Journal, Slate reported, which also said, “Had we known of the parallels, we would not have published the article.”
Slate also noted that despite the overwhelming evidence otherwise, Crowley insisted, in very Nixonian fashion, that she had not plagiarized.
Apparently, that incident did nothing to make Crowley more cautious in her writing. Today, CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski found more than 50 examples of plagiarism in her 2012 book, published by Fox News’ sister company HarperCollins. Kaczynski wrote:
The review of Crowley’s June 2012 book, “What The (Bleep) Just Happened,” found upwards of 50 examples of plagiarism from numerous sources, including the copying with minor changes of news articles, other columnists, think tanks, and Wikipedia. The New York Times bestseller, published by the HarperCollins imprint Broadside Books, contains no notes or bibliography.
Crowley did not return a request for comment. Multiple requests for comment by phone and email over the past two days to HarperCollins went unreturned.
[…]
Trump’s transition team is standing by Crowley.
“Monica’s exceptional insight and thoughtful work on how to turn this country around is exactly why she will be serving in the Administration,” a statement from a transition spokesperson said. “HarperCollins—one of the largest and most respected publishers in the world—published her book which has become a national best-seller. Any attempt to discredit Monica is nothing more than a politically motivated attack that seeks to distract from the real issues facing this country.”
Kaczynski provides so many examples, from so many different sources, of similarities between her work and others that nobody with a scintilla of integrity or common sense could conclude that they were coincidences.
Crowley has long had a rather - er, interesting - relationship with facts. We have caught her many times promoting wacky conspiracy theories on Fox. Watch one of our favorites below, in which Crowley accused CBS’ Bob Schieffer of offering secretly-coded campaign suggestions to Obama advisor David Axelrod, from a 2010 appearance on The O’Reilly Factor.
Crossposted at News Hounds.
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