Milwaukee sheriff, cowboy hat enthusiast, and negligent jailer David Clarke is supposedly set to join the Department of Homeland Security. However, plagiarism accusations may be throwing a wrench in the sheriff’s plans. Now Clarke is lashing out at his critics.
According to reports, Clarke “failed to properly attribute his sources 47 times” throughout his master’s thesis on security studies for his postgraduate degree at the Naval Postgraduate School. In the paper, Clarke credited sources with a footnote but did not include quotation marks to indicate that he had lifted the language. In response, the school has taken Clarke’s paper off the web while it investigates whether he committed plagiarism.
CNN’s KFile, which investigated the thesis, pointed out several instances that look particularly damning on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/KFILE/status/866293361908617218
In a radio interview with Joe Pags, Clarke said the accusations might cost him his job in the Trump administration, saying “time will tell” while showing some resolve over what he perceives as a partisan attack against him:
“This is about weakening, like I said, the support that I give and that I have with President Donald Trump and Secretary Kelly, it’s to weaken their resolve to hang in there with me,” Clarke said. “Will it be successful? It might, but I’m not going to lose any sleep over that.”
In a second interview with “The Sid and Bernie Show,” Clarke directly attacked CNN and lead KFile reporter Andrew Kaczynski and described his actions, which meet most definitions of plagiarism, as a “formatting” error:
“Everything that I put in there had a citation and, naturally, when you accuse someone of plagiarism, it’s not citing stuff. That’s not even what CNN and their political hack Kaczynski said. They’re saying certain words and phrases I should have put quotation marks around. OK, alright, fine. Maybe from a formatting standpoint the thesis isn’t perfect, but the content is there.”
You can listen to a clip of Clarke’s interview with “The Sid and Bernie Show” here.
(via CNN)