HarperCollins, the publisher of a 2012 book by Monica Crowley, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to fill a key national security post, said Tuesday it was temporarily withdrawing the digital version of the book from circulation amid charges that portions of the book were plagiarized.
The move to suspend sales of Ms. Crowley’s book, “What the (Bleep) Just Happened,” comes after CNN reported over the weekend on what its analysts say were more than four dozen passages in the book closely tracking other writers’ opinion columns, news articles and postings on Wikipedia and various online sources.
In a separate investigation this week, Politico said it had found more than a dozen instances of plagiarism or insufficient citation in passages from Ms. Crowley’s 2000 dissertation for a Ph.D. in international relations at Columbia University.
The book publisher did not address the specific charges, saying in a statement only that the book, “which has reached the end of its natural sales cycle, will no longer be offered for purchase until such time as the author has the opportunity to source and revise the material.”
Ms. Crowley, who contributed opinion columns to The Washington Times and served as the newspaper’s online opinion editor from June 2014 until last month, has been named by Mr. Trump to be the National Security Council’s senior director of strategic communications, a position now held by Ben Rhodes, a close adviser to President Obama.
The White House position does not require a Senate confirmation vote.
During her tenure at The Times, no claims of plagiarism or using information without proper attribution were ever lodged against Ms. Crowley, said Executive Editor Christopher Dolan. The Times will review her work as a columnist.
The Trump campaign has not commented on the HarperCollins decision, but stood strongly behind Ms. Crowley when the CNN report came out Saturday.
“Any attempt to discredit Monica is nothing more than a politically motivated attack that seeks to distract from the real issues facing the country,” the campaign said in a statement. “Monica’s exceptional insight and thoughtful work on how to turn this country around is exactly why she will be serving in the [Trump] administration.”
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