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Milwaukee • Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, who says he has been appointed an assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has denied he plagiarized content in his master's thesis on homeland security, while the Naval Postgraduate School confirmed Sunday that it's reviewing the allegations.
The denial followed a CNN report Saturday saying Clarke, who built a following among conservatives with his provocative social media presence and strong support of President Donald Trump, failed to properly attribute his sources at least 47 times in his 2013 thesis, titled "Making U.S. security and privacy rights compatible."
Clarke wrote in an email to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that "only someone with a political agenda would say this is plagiarism."
The Department of Homeland Security hasn't confirmed Clarke's appointment as assistant secretary, which the tough-talking, cowboy hat-wearing sheriff announced Wednesday during an appearance on a Wisconsin radio talk show. Clarke said he would act as a liaison between DHS Secretary John Kelly and state and local government officials, including mayors and law enforcement, as well as people in the private sector.
The Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, removed his thesis from its online archive Friday, Lt. Cmdr. Clint Phillips, a school spokesman, told The Associated Press on Sunday.
The CNN report said Clarke lifted language from several sources, and footnoted those sources, but did not use quotation marks to show he had used passages verbatim, despite school guidelines saying that material quoted word-for-word must be set off with quotation marks or presented as indented text for longer passage, and be followed with a proper citation.
A Sherif man, Fran McLaughlin, told the newspaper Clarke followed the school's system for writing papers and that the CNN report was biased. She declined to provide additional information when asked by the AP Sunday, writing in an email, "The sheriff said to follow national media for his response to this smear."