REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton
President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for a top role in the National Security Council plagiarized large parts of her Ph.D. dissertation, Politico reports. Monica Crowley, a conservative political commentator, copied large sections of text without attribution for her 2000 dissertation at Columbia University, Politico found. In some instances, she appeared to paste text directly from its original source without citation, while in other instances she cited her sources but did not indicate that the text had been copied from the older works. The Politico report comes two days after a CNN investigation that found more than 50 plagiarized passages in her 2012 book What the (Bleep) Just Happened? The book appeared to have been copied in part from Wikipedia, other journalists, and a 2004 blog post on a podiatry website. Crowley was also accused of plagiarism in 1999, when readers complained of similarities between a column she wrote for The Wall Street Journal and a 1988 column by another author. The Journal later apologized for the similarities.
The Trump transition team did not respond to Politico's inquiries, and dismissed CNN’s report as a biased attack. “Any attempt to discredit Monica is nothing more than a politically motivated attack that seeks to distract from the real issues facing this country,” the team told CNN.