Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke denied allegations Saturday that he plagiarized his master’s thesis, calling the reporter who first broke the story a “sleaze bag.”
CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski and his team, known as “KFile,” claim that Clarke broke school guidelines by not properly using quotation marks around verbatim phrases that he used from sources, which he did name in his footnotes.
Clarke reportedly built his 2013 thesis, titled “Making U.S. security and privacy rights compatible,” by using the language from such sources while he attended the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.
{mosads}KFile’s report came a week after Clarke claimed the White House had appointed him to be an assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which the DHS has yet to confirm.
The naval school is reportedly reviewing the claims made in KFile’s article.
Clarke, a vocal supporter of President Trump, responded by claiming that CNN’s KFile has a “political agenda.”
“Only someone with a political agenda would say this is plagiarism,” he said in an email to his hometown newspaper, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
The sheriff also took to Twitter, calling Kaczynski a “sleaze bag,” a “hired gun” and a “CNN hack.”
Kaczynski retweeted Clarke on Sunday, noting he had “yet to respond to the substance of our story.”
Many civil rights groups have accused Clarke of human rights abuses that occurred under his watch as sheriff, with four deaths in his jail since 2016.
Clarke suggested that the narratives coming about as a result of these deaths stem from political prejudice because of his views and support for Trump.
“This has everything to do with politics and my support of Donald Trump,” he told watchdog.org, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing transparency. “These people are invested in bringing me down.”
Corey Stewart, who is running as a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, also echoed Clarke’s attacks of KFile on Sunday.