Reports: Trump Administration To Hire Fox News Personality Monica Crowley for Treasury Job
The Trump administration plans to hire longtime Fox News personality Monica Crowley as a spokeswoman for the Treasury Department, according to multiple reports.
“Crowley will join the staff of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin as assistant secretary for public affairs,” the Washington Examiner reported Wednesday.
The conservative commentator will replace outgoing spokesman Tony Sayegh, who is slated to leave the agency in May.
Two of the top issues Crowley will almost certainly be asked to tackle are promoting the positive benefits to the economy of the GOP tax cuts and addressing congressional Democrats’ demands to see President Donald Trump’s income tax returns.
Crowley was in line to join the Trump administration in 2017 as senior director of communications for the National Security Council but withdrew her name from consideration after plagiarism allegations surfaced, according to Bloomberg.
CNN reported finding several instances from her 2012 book “What the (Bleep) Just Happened” where passages were taken from other sources without being properly cited or placed in quotation marks.
Politico also determined Crowley failed to quote and cite sources in some instances in the doctoral thesis she wrote in 2000 at Columbia University.
A few months after removing herself from consideration for the NSC position, Crowley told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on his program the plagiarism stories were a “political hit job.”
“What happened to me was a despicable, straight-up political hit job, OK?” she said. “It’s been debunked, my editor has completely supported me and backed me up.”
“There is a very dangerous and very effective destabilization campaign underway against this president, his administration and his agenda,” Crowley added.
National Review’s Andrew McCarthy — whom CNN had identified as someone Crowley allegedly took material from without proper attribution — defended her in a February 2017 piece.
“My friend Monica Crowley was the subject of a major hit job by CNN a few weeks back,” McCarthy wrote. “She is a serious scholar, but she was portrayed as a serial plagiarist who never had an original idea in her head. The emotional toll of the uproar caused her to withdraw from her appointment by President Trump to be the senior director of communications at the National Security Council.”
He quoted from the findings of copyright attorney Lynn Chu, who did a study of the plagiarism allegations against Crowley.
“I found CNN’s splashy ‘plagiarism’ accusation to be ill-supported — a heavily exaggerated, political hit job,” Chu wrote. “Instead, after reading texts side by side with footnotes, I came away impressed by the very high quality and care taken by Ms. Crowley in her writing, scholarship and research overall. Many parallels in fact read on the page as rather different even if certain content or phrases were the same, and they were largely short, fragmentary, and routine.”
The copyright attorney continued: “Historical research inevitably draws heavily on the work of other scholars. Dissertations exist to synthesize. The relatively few examples of unsourced copying found was in my opinion de minimus, should just be corrected, and not allowed to besmirch Ms. Crowley’s reputation.”
Crowley joined Fox News the year of its launch in 1996. Though no longer with the network, she continues to regularly appear as a guest commentator.
Crowley is currently a columnist for The Washington Times and a senior fellow at the London Center of Policy Research.
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