CNN Claims Sheriff David Clarke Plagiarized People in His Master Thesis in 2013, Then Admits he Credited the Quotes

Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke -- who last week claimed that he was appointed to be an assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security -- is denying allegations that he plagiarized content in his 2013 master's thesis, while calling the reporter who broke the story a "sleaze bag."



CNN reported on Saturday night that Clarke, a controversial figure who has spoken out against the activist group Black Lives Matter and has been accused of human rights abuses by civil rights groups, lifted language from several sources in building his thesis at the Naval Postgraduate School.



The CNN report claims that Clarke footnoted his sources in the thesis, titled "Making U.S. security and privacy rights compatible," but failed to use quotation marks in places where he had used passages verbatim, which breaks with school guidelines.



The Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, where Clarke earned a master's degree in security studies in 2013, confirmed on Sunday to the Associated Press that the allegations published on CNN are being reviewed. The school removed his thesis from its online archive on Friday, a school spokesman told the AP.



Clarke responded to the allegations in an email to his hometown paper, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, by claiming that the story was partisan in nature.



"Only someone with a political agenda would say this is plagiarism," he wrote.