David Clarke, former Milwaukee sheriff, keeps degree after fixing plagiarized thesis: Report

Former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke has salvaged his master’s degree in security studies from the Naval Postgraduate School in California after fixing multiple instances of plagiarism found in his original 2013 thesis, CNN reported Friday.

Emails obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests revealed that Mr. Clarke submitted a revised thesis accepted by the military academy in March, letting him retain the degree he nearly lost months earlier for lifting language from material including the 9/11 Commission Report and former President George W. Bush’s book “Decision Points,” among others, CNN reported.

Mr. Clarke credited the sources using footnotes in his thesis, “Making U.S. security and privacy rights compatible,” but he failed to use quotation marks to indicate that he was using their language verbatim, violating the academy’s policies against plagiarism.

The school initiated a revision process after CNN uncovered the instances of plagiarism last May, and ultimately Mr. Clark was allowed to keep his degree after spending several months correcting his thesis, according to emails obtained by CNN.

“Matters of questionable academic conduct are not the norm on campus, but this case was handled as any other similar case would be,” said Dale Kuska, the school’s director of communications. “We followed our instructions, as written, during the adjudication and Honor Board procedures, through the resubmission and acceptance of the thesis,” they said in a statement to CNN.

Mr. Clarke, 61, did not return multiple requests for comment, CNN reported, and instead he took to Twitter to attack the network and Andrew Kaczynski, one of the journalist responsible for the report. In a tweet Saturday morning, Mr. Clarke called CNN a “LYING LIB MEDIA outlet” and Mr. Kaczynski a “2 TIME COLLEGE DROPOUT.”

“FINISH COLLEGE KACZYNSKI,” he tweeted.

A registered Democrat, Mr. Clarke supported the Republican candidate in the 2016 White House race and was previously rumored to be in the running for a position in President Trump’s administration. He served as sheriff of Milwaukee County from 2002 to 2017, and currently he served as spokesman and adviser to a pro-Trump political action committee, America First Action.