Pete Hegseth accused of plagiarism by Princeton student newspaper

Pete Hegseth, the frequently embattled Trump administration defense secretary, has now been accused of plagiarism by the student newspaper of his alma mater, Princeton University.

A report by The Daily Princetonian alleges that his senior thesis, submitted by Hegseth in 2003, contains eight instances of “uncredited material, sham paraphrasing, and verbatim copying.”

The outlet had the thesis, “Modern Presidential Rhetoric and the Cold War Context,” reviewed by three plagiarism experts. They were not made aware of the identity of the author before assessing the work.

In one example, Hegseth wrote about President George W. Bush’s reaction to being told of the first attack on the World Trade Center in New York on 9/11.

“After Card‘s whisper, Bush looked distracted and somber but continued to listen to the second-graders, joking that they ‘read like sixth-graders,’” wrote the now defense secretary.

An article in The Washington Post, published in 2001 shortly after the attacks, reads: “After Card‘s whisper, Bush looked distracted and somber but continued to listen to the second-graders read and soon was smiling again. He joked that they read so well, they must be sixth-graders.”

The Post article is not cited in Hegseth’s paper.

Plagiarism detection models flagged 12 passages in the thesis, and the experts consulted by the newspaper found only eight of those were significant, with the remaining four being not significant enough to be concerning alone but “fit a broader pattern of some form of plagiarism.”

While the three experts all said that the passages violated Princeton’s academic honesty regulations, they had differing opinions on whether the instances were serious or too minor to matter.

James M. Lang, author of Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty, called the case “borderline.”

He told the Princetonian: “There’s no silver bullet here; there’s no smoking gun in terms of a deep example of plagiarism,” and said there was more “gray than black and white,” with roughly half of the examples constituting serious plagiarism and the other half only being minor.

In one example where the experts differ, Hegseth wrote: “The Berlin Wall speech represents a rare occurrence in presidential rhetoric; caught up in the emotion of the moment, Kennedy, who had just given a speech about the need for peace, got carried away and just ad-libbed the opposite, saying there was no way to work with the Communists.”

The passage is similar to one from President Kennedy: Profile of Power by Richard Reeves: “In his enthusiasm, Kennedy, who had just given a peace speech and was trying to work out a test ban treaty with the Soviets, had gotten carried away and just ad-libbed the opposite, saying there was no way to work with Communists.”

Reeves is cited in the paper, even for that sentence, but there are no quotation marks. While Lang sees that incident as serious, Jonathan Bailey, who runs the website Plagiarism Today, didn’t see that or any of the other seven as egregious.

“Even the ones that were more direct still typically only involve a sentence or two at a time,” Bailey told the Princetonian.

The third expert consulted, Guy Curtis, a researcher at the University of Western Australia who studies academic integrity, said that the thesis violated rules as set out by the university regarding unattributed copying.

“Once you get 10 to 15 words in a row by ‘accident’ that happen to correspond with something else — it’s probably not accidental,” Curtis said.

There are no set rules at Princeton for addressing such issues after graduation, and they could be explained by sloppiness or oversight.

Bailey told the paper: “This doesn’t fit the pattern of someone who went into this deliberately, maliciously trying to plagiarize their way to finishing it. This seems like it was just poor writing techniques and poor methodology.”

The senior thesis is a graduation requirement for all undergraduate students. Hegseth graduated in 2003.

Following the publication of the The Daily Princetonian’s article, Chief Pentagon Spokesperson Sean Parnell provided a statement to Konstantin Toropin, a reporter for military.com.

“Secretary Hegseth has written five books. He’s written hundreds of papers and op-eds. During the confirmation process, every word was reviewed by top left-wing law firms working in conjunction with every media outlet in the country. They found no plagiarism because there was no plagiarism,” he said. “This is a fake story designed to distract from the DoD’s historic accomplishments under President Trump and Secretary Hegseth’s leadership.”

The defense secretary had a difficult confirmation process on Capitol Hill and has since been plagued by scandals relating to his sharing of sensitive military operational information in Signal group chats.