Wisconsin Sheriff David Clarke, the self-promoting, polarizing Black sheriff from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, announced in May 2017 that he would leave his job to become assistant director of the Department of Homeland Security in the Donald Trump Administration.
Neither the White House nor the Department of Homeland Security confirmed Clarke’s announcement.
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/05/17/sheriff-david-clarke-homeland-security-job-238517
CNN then reported that Clark had committed plagiarism in his master’s thesis at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Clarke failed to properly attribute his sources about 50 times.
The network’s website cited several examples of plagiarism from the thesis.
https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2017/05/politics/sheriff-clarke-plagiarism/
Clarke denied that he committed plagiarism.
“Only someone with a political agenda would say this is plagiarism,” Clarke responded.
He said that CNN had accused GOP U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Trump appointee Monica Crowley of plagiarism.
https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2017/05/politics/sheriff-clarke-plagiarism/
Clarke’s response would have been more convincing if Paul and/or Crowley had not committed plagiarism.
They both had committed plagiarism.
Crowley withdrew her name for consideration as communications director for the National Security Council after she had been charged with committing plagiarism.
See Monica Crowley,
Paul, too, admitted that he had plagiarized in his speeches.
Clark told a conservative talk radio host that what he did wasn’t “plagiarism,” it was “a formatting error.”
https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2017/05/politics/sheriff-clarke-plagiarism/
Huh?
Kelly McBride, who once led the ethics department of the Poynter Institute, a journalism and research center, said, “I think it’s slam-dunk plagiarism.”
CNN then added the following from McBride: “Clarke’s failure to use quotation marks wasn’t a mere oversight, she argued. By slightly changing the passages, he couldn’t use quotation marks, since he wasn’t using the material verbatim. But by not using quotations, he was presenting those ideas as his own.
“ ‘The words aren’t his words,’ ” McBride said.
PolitiFact, the Poynter Institute’s fact-checking website, used multiple examples of plagiarism from Clarke’s thesis.
https://www.politifact.com/article/2017/may/30/did-sheriff-david-clarke-commit-plagiarism/
Kevin M. Kruse, a Princeton historian, was quoted in Reason.com as saying that Clarke committed plagiarism in his master’s thesis.
“I’m a professor. This is textbook plagiarism.” Kruse said, adding that Clarke “plagiarized to get an academic degree.”
When a talk radio host pointed out that Clarke had footnoted his sources, Kruse said that didn’t matter.
“We’d expel a student who pulled this,” Kruse said.
Clarke was not offered the job at DHS.
But his outrageously bad acts as sheriff went far beyond plagiarism, New York Times’ op-ed writer Patrick Tomlinson, a Milwaukee political commentator, wrote in May 2017.
Tomlinson said that Clarke, who was elected as a Democrat, turned himself into a darling to Trump and other extremist conservatives by saying that Blacks Lives Matter would “join forces with ISIS.” In July, he drew scrutiny when after writing a piece for The Hill suggesting there was a “civil war” between law enforcement officers and members of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Clarke has called Black Lives Matter “Black Lies Matter.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-police-clarke-idUSKCN0W00GH
In addition, Clarke called for the suspension of habeas corpus in the United States, so that criminal suspects could be jailed indefinitely. He said that there were perhaps one million people in the United States who were terrorist sympathizers and they needed to be sent to the Guantanamo Bay federal prison.
Clark resigned as sheriff in 2017 to join a pro-Donald Trump super PAC, America First Action, as spokesman and senior advisor. Clark, who became recognizable for his trademark Stetson hat, appeared regularly on Fox News until he was banned from the network.
