When Donald Trump takes office later this week, he will do so at the helm of perhaps the most ethically challenged administration in recent American history, if not all of American history. From Trump himself on down, the Trump White House will be full to the brim of officials with stratospheric conflicts of interest and shady pasts.
Well, it looks like there’s one ethical lapse that seems to be too much even for Trump–plagiarism. Fox News contributor, right-wing talk show host and columnist Monica Crowley was slated to become senior director of strategic communications at the National Security Council. However, on Monday, she announced that she will not take up the post after a series of devastating reports exposed her as a serial plagiarist who may have–for all intents and purposes–stolen a doctoral degree.
Watch CNN’s coverage here.
The ground began shifting from under Crowley’s feet on January 7, when CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski discovered that Crowley’s 2012 book, “What the (Bleep) Just Happened,” didn’t have any notes or bibliography. Further analysis revealed that the book was a steaming pile of plagiarism. Specifically, Kaczynski and his team at the CNN KFile no fewer than 50 instances where she lifted words, sentences, and entire paragraphs from other sources and passed them off as her own words. Watch CNN’s coverage of this here.
By Tuesday, Crowley’s publisher, HarperCollins, had yanked the book from the shelves until Crowley could “source and revise the material.”
The Trump transition team initially denounced the report as a hatchet job. Even then, that seemed hard to believe, since she was busted for plagiarism at least once before, when she appeared to lift a 1998 paean to Richard Nixon in The Wall Street Journal from a 1988 article in Commentary magazine.
But that stance became virtually untenable when Politico revealed that Crowley’s Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia had been compromised by plagiarism. Politico found at least 12 cases where Crowley lifted text from other scholarly works without proper attribution–either by failing to include quotes, wholesale copying, or cosmetic paraphrasing.
More plagiarism from Monica Crowley's Ph.D. dissertation: https://t.co/zCyZ8SE5O0 pic.twitter.com/7qLqGgjenw
— POLITICO Magazine (@POLITICOMag) January 10, 2017
CNN’s Kaczynski conducted his own investigation, and counted at least 50 instances of plagiarism accounting for “thousands of words.” She’d lifted words from scholarly journals, the Associated Press, and Henry Kissinger.
https://twitter.com/KFILE/status/819544271133036544
In both cases, there was radio silence from the Trump team and from Crowley herself; she hasn’t posted on social media since New Year’s Day.
Then last Monday, Kaczynski discovered that at least seven of her columns in The Washington Times, where she had served as an online opinion editor and columnist, had been plagiarized from multiple sources–Fox News, Reuters, the AP, and The Washington Times itself.
Within a week, Crowley was finished. She announced that “after much reflection,” she has decided to “pursue other opportunities.” Translation: she jumped before getting pushed. According to The New York Times, Crowley would have been responsible for reviewing speeches by national security adviser Michael Flynn and other national security aides–one of the last things you would want a serial plagiarist to do.
This isn’t over by a longshot for Crowley, or her previous employers. The Washington Times is currently reviewing Crowley’s work, though she never faced allegations of cribbing during her tenure there. Hopefully Fox News and other outlets for which she wrote will do the same.
Additionally, there are multiple calls for Columbia to yank her doctorate. Robbin Laird of the online defense blog Breaking Defense, a Columbia graduate and a Trump supporter, wrote an open letter to Columbia president Lee Bolinger denouncing Crowley’s actions as “an academic crime” that demanded the revocation of her degree and the punishment of her dissertation adviser and dissertation committee for the sake of the school’s credibility. John Avarosis of AmericaBlog started a petition calling for Columbia to launch a full investigation; sign here.
Trump has had a hard time picking a national security team because virtually every Republican national security professional worth getting is a never-Trumper. But this can only be described as a serious lapse in judgment. A cursory amount of vetting–even a Google search–would have exposed Crowley’s plagiarism within minutes. If Trump was desperate enough to fill those posts that he didn’t do even cursory vetting, that says a lot about him.
(featured image courtesy Crowley’s Facebook)
