Sheriff David Clarke of Milwaukee County, Wis., reportedly plagiarized parts of his 2014 master’s thesis on U.S. homeland security, according to a report by CNN Saturday.
Clarke, who said this week he has accepted a job as assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security, used language from sources without properly attributing them or using quotes in some places, according to the report.
He earned his master’s degree in security studies at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.
{mosads}The school’s website’s guidelines on plagiarism say, “If a passage is quoted verbatim, it must be set off with quotation marks (or, if it is a longer passage, presented as indented text), and followed by a properly formulated citation. The length of the phrase does not matter. If someone else’s words are sufficiently significant to be worth quoting, then accurate quotation followed by a correct citation is essential, even if only a few words are involved.”
CNN’s report sets Clarke’s master’s thesis side-by-side with the sources he pulls from, revealing multiple passages that appear to be direct copies of other people’s wording.
During the 2016 presidential race, Clarke supported President Trump, and he has praised him since the inauguration. At the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, Clarke spoke of his support for Trump’s executive orders on immigration, and would have a role in related policy should he be be confirmed for a job at the department of Homeland Security.
Clarke has become a controversial figure for comments such as calling Black Lives Matter a hate group.