Overview

• The Daily Princetonian, in consultation with three plagiarism experts, reported that Pete Hegseth’s senior thesis contains eight instances of uncredited material, sham paraphrasing, and verbatim copying.
• Automated plagiarism detection flagged 12 passages in the thesis, with experts deeming eight of them significant violations of Princeton’s academic honesty standards.
• One example includes a nearly identical sentence to a 2001 Washington Post article about President George W. Bush’s reaction to the 9/11 attacks, which was not cited in Hegseth’s thesis.
• The experts consulted agreed that the thesis violated academic integrity rules but differed on whether the violations were serious or indicative of poor writing practices.
• The Pentagon, through Chief Spokesperson Sean Parnell, dismissed the allegations as a fabricated distraction from the Defense Department’s achievements under Hegseth’s leadership.