President-elect Trump’s pick to be his senior director of strategic communications, Monica Crowley, plagiarized several passages in a 2012 book she wrote, according to a report Saturday.
The report found 50 instances in Crowley’s book, “What The (Bleep) Just Happened,” where text from news articles, think tanks and Wikipedia were nearly identical with only minor adjustments. Also listed are examples of similar text from Fox News, where Crowley up until recently appeared as a contributor, as well as writers at National Review, Associated Press, the New York Times, Politico, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the BBC and Yahoo News.
The book, which was a New York Times bestseller, did not posses notes or a bibliography, according to the report.
Here is Monica Crowley’s plagiarized list of silly things in the stimulus. None of them were in the stimulus. pic.twitter.com/wJbGv8zCtb
— Michael Grunwald (@MikeGrunwald) January 7, 2017
The plagiarism in Crowley’s book is extensive and includes copying columnists, news reports, Wikipedia, Investopediahttps://t.co/EVD0E3j4xE pic.twitter.com/z4h8gBPj6w
— andrew kaczynski? (@KFILE) January 7, 2017
The Trump transition team dismissed the review by CNN’s KFile as an attempt to damage Crowley’s credibility.
“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 transition spokesperson told CNN. “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.”
Crowley was also accused of plagiarizing a Commentary magazine article back in the late 1990s. She denied the claim, saying, “‘I did not, nor would I ever, use material from a source without citing it.”
