Trump admirer and Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke allegedly plagiarized parts of master's thesis according to a report written by three reporters — Andrew Kaczynski, Christopher Massie, and Nathan McDermott — for CNN. The report accuses Clarke of plagiarizing content over 40 times in his 2013 master's thesis on national security while he was enrolled at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Clarke has firmly denied the allegations arriving from the news network.
In the CNN report, Clarke is accused of allegedly neglecting the basic requisites of proper attribution. In his 2013 master's thesis, CNN alleged that Clarke supposedly "lifts language from sources and credits them with a footnote, but does not indicate with quotation marks that he is taking the words verbatim."
In a statement to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Clarke said, "Only someone with a political agenda would say this is plagiarism." To drive the point home, Clarke did not hold himself back from calling Kaczynski, one of the reporters who wrote the CNN report, names. For instance, Clarke tweeted that Kaczynski is a "sleaze bag" and that he is "on to him, folks."
Recently, Clarke announced that he would be joining Trump's government as an assistant secretary for Homeland Security. However, later on, a spokesperson for the Department for Homeland Security denied an official announcement had been made about any such development.
According to CNN, the content that Clarke allegedly copied included several reports from the ACLU, a commission report on 9/11, an article in the Homeland Security Affairs journal from 2011, and more. The CNN report also accuses Clarke of allegedly copying language from George W Bush's Decision Points book. Again, Clarke has strongly denied these plagiarism allegations.
For those unaware, Clarke is no stranger to controversy. Back in 2016, the Milwaukee sheriff tweeted a rebuke against Black Lives Matter by saying, "Black LIES Matter wants this conversation about Black lives? Let's have it dammit. Talk to me about Chicago black on black murder Black LIES." He also penned a highly critical take on the protests in Milwaukee led by activists demanding racial justice. He described the unrest as "tribal behavior" in an opinion piece for The Hill.
The Naval Postgraduate School also responded to the CNN report. It told CNN that it planned to launch an inquiry into the contentious matter. The plan is pretty simple. "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," a spokesperson for the school told CNN.
If you are curious, you should check the detailed report from CNN which also includes breathtaking side-by-side comparisons of Clarke's text right next to articles and documents that appear to feature matching content.
