Monica Crowley, Donald Trump’s choice for a top national security communications position, plagiarized multiple sections of her dissertation for her Columbia University Ph.D. in international relations, according to a Politico Magazine investigation published Tuesday.
Politico found more than a dozen instances in which Crowley borrowed text from scholarly works on U.S. foreign policy with minimal changes for her 2000 dissertation “Clearer Than Truth: Determining and Preserving Grand Strategy: The Evolution of American Policy Toward the People’s Republic of China Under Truman and Nixon.” Some sections were copied directly, while others were paraphrased without proper attribution.
CNN this weekend published evidence of a similar pattern of plagiarism in Crowley’s 2012 book “What The (Bleep) Just Happened,” uncovering 50 sections that were lifted from news articles, conservative columns, Wikipedia, and think tank publications.
After initially declining to comment, publisher HarperCollins told CNN Tuesday that the book will be pulled from sale until the material is properly revised.
BREAKING: @HarperCollins tells me Monic Crowley’s book is being taken down until revisions can be made. Story coming… pic.twitter.com/YAdmt5ZDEj
— andrew kaczynski (@KFILE) January 10, 2017
Crowley is a former Fox News commentator picked by Trump to serve as the National Security Council’s senior director of strategic communications, a role that does not require Senate confirmation.
Trump’s transition team did not respond to Politico’s request for comment, but told CNN that its report on Crowley’s plagiarism was “nothing more than a politically motivated attack that seeks to distract from the real issues facing this country.”
Politico’s report marks the third time Crowley has been publicly accused of plagiarism. In 1999, Slate found that a column she wrote for the Wall Street Journal was borrowed largely from a 1988 article from the conservative magazine Commentary.
Damn! Michelle Obama writes great papers as well?
Will Columbia rescind her PhD? Not likely, but one can hope.
It turns out that Green of Green/Lacour infamy was on her committee.
FOX: Old news.
Trump: For gods sake, she is a Republican, just let it go.
Monica: This is persecution of The Whites.
Snooky: Liberals never liked conservative women. Never.
Fortunately, the Trump team has a ready-made response to this story, which they used in their response to the last plagiarism story.
Universities do revoke PhDs, even many years later, if plagiarism is uncovered. Academic dishonesty is a serious issue, and I know of many talented individuals whose career was virtually ended because of a such a charge (even for less serious charges than plagiarizing the dissertation).