RUTHFULLY YOURS

Allegations of academic plagiarism are the latest weapon the left-wingers of the mainstream media are using in an effort to take down Milwaukee County, Wisc., Sheriff David Clarke.

The Left’s politics of personal destruction played no small role in the defeat at the polls last November of Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio (R). More recently, the Left played a role in the departure of top-rated Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, and now that they smell conservative blood in the water, the character assassins at the George Soros-funded Media Matters for America are stepping up their efforts to force Sean Hannity off the airwaves.

These people are going after Clarke, a high-profile conservative and outspoken champion of law and order, because they view him as a threat to Democratic Party interests. Democrats, of course, think they hold a monopoly on black support and are threatened by strong black conservatives, so they attack and smear them at every opportunity.

Hitting Clarke, a longtime supporter of President Trump, became especially urgent for the Left after he announced a little over a week ago that he would be taking a position at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in June. The position, assistant secretary of DHS for partnership and engagement, does not require confirmation by the Senate.

Clarke, a strong Second Amendment advocate, was one of three black speakers to appear at the Republican National Convention last summer. He is also eminently quotable. He has told Black Lives Matter activists to “stop trying to fix the police, fix the ghetto,” and described Ferguson protesters as “vultures on a roadside carcass.”

Days after Clarke made the DHS appointment public, a team of CNN researchers led by serial exaggerator Andrew Kaczynski conveniently accused him of plagiarism with respect to his 2013 master’s thesis on U.S. security studies for the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. (The thesis may be viewed here.)

According to CNN:

In his thesis, “Making U.S. security and privacy rights compatible,” Clarke failed to properly attribute his sources at least 47 times. 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.

Just to be clear, Clarke is not being accused of brazen, outright theft of intellectual property. He is accused of failing to insert quotation marks where required after properly attributing the words of others to various sources by way of footnotes.

Leaving out quotation marks “steals the hard work of writing from others,” tweeted Peter Shulman, an associate history professor at Case Western Reserve University. “But it also reveals a person who doesn’t take rules seriously, at least for themselves. Not a quality you want in a police officer.”

Among the sources in the thesis mentioned by CNN are the ACLU, the 9/11 Commission Report, an article in Homeland Security Affairs journal, Pew Research Center, the Washington Post, a textbook, a research paper, and former President George W. Bush’s book, Decision Points.

After the CNN story was posted, Clarke denied he committed plagiarism. “Only someone with a political agenda would say this is plagiarism,” he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Clarke also referred to CNN’s grand plagiarism inquisitor Andrew Kaczynski as “a sleaze bag,” on Twitter. “I’m on to him folks.”

Clarke said separately that “maybe from a formatting standpoint, the thesis isn’t perfect, but the content is there,” and pointed out that “these hired guns” have gone after plenty of conservatives and Republicans.

It is significant that CNN’s smear vehicle against Clarke is written by Kaczynski, formerly of BuzzFeed, the cat video-loving gossip website run by Ben Smith, a former Politico reporter known for reflexively defending President Obama. Kaczynski quit BuzzFeed to join CNN in October.

Clarke also said the plagiarism accusation is a “character assassination attempt by some 2-bit college dropout,” referring to Kaczynski, who attended two universities but never earned a degree.

CNN and BuzzFeed have been targeting Republicans and conservatives for destruction for some time. BuzzFeed published the notorious “piss-gate” dossier without bothering to verify its contents. Within the document dump were wild claims that Trump had intelligence links to Russia, along with a fondness for sex acts involving urine. It’s the kind of lurid tabloid trash for which BuzzFeed has become known.

CNN enthusiastically promoted the fake news story. CNN also played a significant role in pushing the debunked lie started by NBC’s Katy Tur that Trump asked Russia to hack computer systems in order to defeat his opponent Hillary Clinton. At Trump’s first formal press conference as president-elect, he pointedly refused to take a question from CNN reporter Jim Acosta and described the network as a purveyor of “fake news.”

Another one of Kaczynski’s victims is conservative commentator Monica Crowley.

Kaczynski claimed that in her 2012 book, What The (Bleep) Just Happened, he discovered, “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.”

But an expert on plagiarism rejected Kaczynski’s allegations, saying they were part of a “political hit job.” Publishing law attorney Lynn Chu said she looked at Crowley’s work and “found CNN’s splashy ‘plagiarism’ accusation to be ill-supported—a heavily exaggerated, political hit job.”

The “CNN list [or plagiarized passages] was misleadingly long, possibly a calculated attempt to condemn her with manufactured, but false, bulk.”

Chu also accused CNN of deliberately misrepresenting evidence. In two dozen of the supposed examples of plagiarism cited by the cable TV network, “CNN hid from readers that her footnotes gave proper credit to the source,” she said.

“I came away impressed by the very high quality and care taken by Ms. Crowley in her writing, scholarship and research overall,” Chu said. There were “relatively few examples of unsourced copying” that should simply “be corrected, and not allowed to besmirch Ms. Crowley’s reputation.”

Meanwhile, media outlets and left-wing columnists are ganging up on Clarke in an effort to neutralize him as a political player.

Salon ran a story on May 19 titled “Looks like Sheriff David Clarke’s ‘army’ medals might be B.S.,” citing the various pins he wears on his dress uniform. But even the left-wingers at Snopes rejected the claim, ruling it “false.” Snopes noted that the pins aren’t military medals and that Clarke has never claimed to have served in the armed forces.

Michael Price of the leftist Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law wrote an op-ed at the Huffington Post denouncing Clarke for favoring the enforcement of the laws of the land.

At the same time, Clarke continues to rail against sanctuary cities protecting immigrants, vowing to apply “leverage” and “twist arms” to compel states to enforce federal policy priorities, effectively commandeering state and local police. … He believes that mass incarceration is a myth and is horribly out of step with prominent police chiefs and prosecutors who recognize that public safety means ending mass incarceration and building public trust.

The New York Times ran a hatchet-job of an op-ed by embittered Milwaukee political commentator Patrick S. Tomlinson after the plagiarism allegations surfaced.

David Clarke is not fit for public office. He is incompetent, dishonest, petty, vindictive and cruel. Take it from someone who has had a front-row seat to his antics: Do whatever you can to keep him out of public service, and public life, permanently.

The Cap Times in Madison, Wisc., ran an editorial trashing Clarke.

Could the Trump administration possibly be worse?

That’s a daunting notion. And it suggests a second question: Could there be anyone who has less respect for the U.S. Constitution than Donald Trump?

If you answered “yes” to both questions, then you are probably aware that Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke Jr., an ardent ally of the president and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, has announced that he will become an assistant secretary in the Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security. Though DHS officials have so far declined to confirm the selection, Clarke said, “I’m looking forward to joining that team” as a top official in the department’s Office of Partnership and Engagement, which coordinates DHS outreach efforts to state, local, tribal, and territorial governments and to local law enforcement agencies.

If Clarke gets the job, he’ll arrive as an over-the-top Trump apologist who makes the president’s bluster about “enemy of the state” journalism, disregard for privacy rights, and proposals for religious tests seem mild by comparison.

Expect much more of this in coming days because in the eyes of the Left, David Clarke must be stopped.