Monica Crowley Is the First Casualty of the Trump Administration

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Monica Crowley won’t be joining the Trump administration after all:

“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.”

I haven’t bothered blogging about this, but just in case you missed the news, it turns out that Crowley is a serial plagiarist. As it happens, I have a pretty high tolerance for the kind of plagiarism that’s usually involved in cases like this (a dozen lines or paragraphs that are semi-copied from other sources in a 500-page book), but it turns out that Crowley also plagiarized great big chunks of her PhD dissertation. That’s a different thing altogether. Not only did she plagiarize a lot, but she did it in a setting where the whole point is to demonstrate original research and original thought. I don’t know if universities can rescind a PhD, but I’ll bet Columbia is looking pretty hard at doing just that.

I doubt that either Trump or Michael Flynn cares about this, but on the other hand, they probably don’t care much about Crowley either. So she’s gone.

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

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