Former Fox News contributor Monica Crowley has decided not to join the Donald Trump administration after all. Although she said she had decided to “pursue other opportunities” instead, her change of heart occurred after multiple instances of plagiarism were revealed in her work.
The Washington Times reported:
Ms. Crowley, who had been tapped to be senior director of strategic communications at the National Security Council, had been dogged in recent weeks by questions about whether she lifted portions of her past written work from other writers. Her move seemed designed to keep that from becoming a distraction as the Trump team prepares to take office.
“After much reflection I have decided to remain in New York to pursue other opportunities and will not be taking a position in the incoming administration,” she said in a statement. “I greatly appreciate being asked to be part of President-elect Trump’s team and I will continue to enthusiastically support him and his agenda for American renewal.”
As the Times also noted, Crowley was also formerly a columnist and an online opinion editor for the publication. What the Times did not note is that the “questions” about Crowley’s plagiarism have been pretty definitively answered. As we reported in December, CNN found more than 50 examples of plagiarism in her last book, which her publisher subsequently stopped selling. In 2004, we previously reported that a 1999 Wall Street Journal Editorial by Crowley contained so many similarities to another article by someone else, the paper wrote, “Had we known of the parallels, we would not have published the article.”
Since the CNN report, Politico found numerous examples of plagiarism in Crowley’s 2000 Ph.D. dissertation.
But hey, as Crooks and Liars asked, how soon before Fox News puts her back on the air? Fox didn’t let a little thing like a perjury conviction over using racial slurs get in the way of hiring Mark Fuhrman and using him to discuss racially sensitive issues. It certainly hasn’t disturbed Fox that our next president may have committed treason. So why wouldn’t the network pay Crowley to work on “strategic communications” for the Trump administration right there at Trump PR “fair and balanced” HQ?
By the way, in a delicious coincidence, Andrew Kaczynski, the CNN reporter who first shone a spotlight on Crowley’s plagiarism when he found the 50+ examples of in her book, just happened to be a recent arrival from BuzzFeed. That's the same BuzzFeed which Trump has attacked as "a failing pile of garbage" for publishing an unverified dossier about the compromising information Russia has on him. But nobody's denying Crowley's a plagiarist now, eh?
Watch Crowley talk below about how anyone running for president should expect “every word that they utter will be scrutinized and pounded by the left-wing media as well as their opponents.” It's from an October, 2015 O'Reilly Factor appearance, via Crooks and Liars. I guess she didn’t think the same thing applied to her.
Keep in mind that O’Reilly’s own scholastic issues with his writing, ie his complete fabrications about his own history, will come into play here. O’Reilly will sympathize with Crowley on the basis of “I know what it’s like to be vilified by these people” and “They only hate you because you’re effective”, etc.
She did not own up to plagiarizing. So much for that personal responsibility thing conservatives are always lecturing black people about.
She owes a lot of writers some big time mea culpas for lifting their work without permission and/or proper credit. Hopefully they will go after her with regards to the proceeds of her book at the very least.
