Investigative reporters at CNN are calling Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. a plagiarist after examining his master’s thesis written about U.S. security to earn his degree at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. They said they found 47 instances when Clarke failed to properly attribute the sources of verbatim quotations. Clarke announced this week that he will be joining the Trump regime as an assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security. The thesis is titled "Making U.S. security and privacy rights compatible."
Clarke is known for his alignment with Pr*sident Donald Trump, tough talk, disgust with dissent, and over-the-top characterizations of people he disagrees with, including Black Lives Matter and anyone to the left of Genghis Khan.
Andrew Kaczynski, Christopher Massie and Nathan McDermott, all part of the so-called K-File team that CNN purloined from Buzzfeed last October, reported:
In all instances reviewed by CNN's KFile, Clarke lifts language from sources and credits them with a footnote, but does not indicate with quotation marks that he is taking the words verbatim.
According to guidelines on plagiarism posted on the Naval Postgraduate School's website, "If a passage is quoted verbatim, it must be set off with quotation marks (or, if it is a longer passage, presented as indented text), and followed by a properly formulated citation. The length of the phrase does not matter. If someone else's words are sufficiently significant to be worth quoting, then accurate quotation followed by a correct citation is essential, even if only a few words are involved."
The school's honor code defines plagiarism as "submitting material that in part or whole is not one's own work without proper attribution. Plagiarism is further defined as the use, without giving reasonable and appropriate credit to or acknowledging the author or source, of another person's original work, whether such work is made up of code, formulas, ideas, language, research, strategies, writing or other form(s)."
Among other places, the lifted quotations came from reports by the American Civil Liberties Union, the 9/11 Commission report, a textbook, The Washington Post, the Pew Research Center, and even former President George W. Bush’s book, Decision Points.
"Like all academic institutions, the Naval Postgraduate School takes the integrity of our students' work very seriously, perhaps even more than our peers given the unique nature of our mission and student body," Lt. Cdr. Clint Phillips said. "Standard procedure to any formal accusation of plagiarism is to pull the student's thesis, and perform an investigation into the validity of the claims."
The reporters did not say whether a formal accusation has been filed.
The CNN team said it attempted to reach Clarke for his point of view in the matter, but he did not respond directly, choosing Trump’s approach and opting to respond via Twitter: