In some instances, Sabatini, who double-majored in history and philosophy at the university before attending law school, also swapped slightly different words and phrases into the streams of ideas from other authors. In others where he did reference an outside source, The Daily Beast found the citations themselves are often dubious, incorrect and, according to a plagiarism expert, made up. Even the very first sentence of the thesis was lifted almost exactly from the abstract of an academic text published 20 years earlier titled, "The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990."
After analyzing Sabatini's thesis, Mark Algee-Hewitt, the director of graduate studies and associate professor of digital humanities in Stanford University's English department, determined the conservative candidate had committed "egregious" acts of plagiarism. He also noted that "the frequent misspellings in Sabatini's text make matching these harder than it should" and that "many of the references to his secondary sources seem largely fabricated, right down to the page numbers." Sabatini did not return the outlet's request for comment.
