Trump adviser Monica Crowley under fire for allegedly plagiarizing dozens of passages in 2012 book

Former political commentator Monica Crowley, who has been tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to fill a key role in his administration, is under fire for allegedly plagiarizing dozens of sources in her 2012 book, "What The (Bleep) Just Happened," which was published by HarperCollins.

Prior to being tapped by Trump to serve as the senior director of strategic communications for the National Security Council, Crowley was a Fox News contributor and wrote for the Washington Times.

According to an investigation by CNN's KFile, nearly four dozen examples of plagiarism were found in Crowley's book, which was a New York Times bestseller. Crowley allegedly plagiarized news articles, political columnists, think tank reports and of course, Wikipedia. Minor changes were made to some of the passages, but most contained many sentences of lifted text that mirrored the original source without attribution.

More from CNN:

Sections of her book are repeatedly lifted from articles by National Review author Andrew C. McCarthy, who is a friend of Crowley’s. Lines in her book also match word-for-word the work of other columnists, including National Review’s Rich Lowry, Michelle Malkin, conservative economist Stephen Moore, Karl Rove, and Ramesh Ponnuru of Bloomberg View.

Crowley also lifted word-for-word phrases from the Associated Press, the New York Times, Politico, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the BBC, and Yahoo News

In addition, the KFile reports that the book contained no cited works or bibliography, which is highly unusual for nonfiction political commentary books.

Still, Trump's team is standing by Crowley. In a statement to CNN, a Trump transition spokesperson said that any attempt to discredit Crowley "is nothing more than a politically motivated attack."

"Monica’s exceptional insight and thoughtful work on how to turn this country around is exactly why she will be serving in the Administration," the spokesperson said. "HarperCollins—one of the largest and most respected publishers in the world—published her book which has become a national best-seller. Any attempt to discredit Monica is nothing more than a politically motivated attack that seeks to distract from the real issues facing this country."

However, as CNN notes, this isn't the first time Crowley has been accused of plagiarism. In 1999, liberal news magazine Slate reported that a Crowley column in the Wall Street Journal mirrored an 1988 article in Commentary Magazine. At the time, Crowley denied plagiarizing and said that she would never lift someone else's work without attribution.

Click here to view CNN's side-by-side comparisons of Crowley's plagiarized excerpts with their original sources.