Vice President Kamala Harris did not plagiarize multiple passages in her 2009 book, Smart on Crime, campaign spokesman James Singer claimed in a Tuesday statement.

The claim contradicts Harris’s allies in the media, including the New York Times and the New Republic, which reported that she plagiarized multiple passages in her book. Some of the lengthy messages lifted were from Wikipedia and the Associated Press.

“Rightwing operatives are getting desperate as they see the bipartisan coalition of support Vice President Harris is building to win this election, as Trump retreats to a conservative echo chamber refusing to face questions about his lies,” campaign spokesman James Singer alleged.

Conservative journalist Christopher Rufo exposed the plagiarism based on research by Dr. Stefan Weber, a respected Austrian expert on plagiarism.

“This is a book that’s been out for 15 years, and the Vice President clearly cited sources and statistics in footnotes and endnotes throughout,” Singer added.

The campaign’s statement comes one day before it will allow Harris to sit for an interview Wednesday with Fox News’s Bret Baier, who presumably would ask Harris about her most recent scandal. The topic did not come up when Harris appeared for a Tuesday interview with Charlamagne tha God.

The scandal appears to rise to the level of an October surprise, CNN reported:

CNN reviewed several of the passages highlighted by Rufo and found that Harris and O’C. Hamilton failed to properly attribute language to sources.

Plagiarized works include using someone else’s work without giving them proper and appropriate credit for their ideas and words. Even if the source of the information is cited, it is still considered plagiarism if the ideas are not paraphrased or quoted in the correct place, experts told CNN late last year.

In one instance, Harris and O’C. Hamilton appear to have lifted some language from a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release without proper attribution. The book copies exact language and sections of the press release but fails to use quotation marks in several sentences, according to an analysis of the book and the press release.

Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.