The conservative newspaper Washington Times announced on Tuesday that it will end a regular column by Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul amid several allegations of plagiarism in his speeches, columns and his recent book.
Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, has faced a recent string of embarrassing allegations of plagiarism in the past few weeks. Buzzfeed reported that three pages of Paul’s book, Government Bullies: How Everyday Americans are Being Harassed, Abused, and Imprisoned by the Feds, were lifted verbatim from a case study by the Heritage Foundation think tank. Buzzfeed also reported that sections of an op-ed Paul wrote for the Washington Times were plagiarized from an article in The Week. Politico and MSNBC have made similar reports.
The tea party star took responsibility for the instances of plagiarism on CNN and pledged to be more careful in the future, but his team has also pushed back against the accusations as nit-picking, and in an interview with the New York Times, Paul said he resented that “haters” were implying he’s been lifting material dishonestly.
The Washington Times said it independently reviews Paul’s columns and published a correction when Paul failed to attribute passages from other sources. “We expect our columnists to submit original work and to properly attribute material, and we appreciate that the senator and his staff have taken responsibility for an oversight in one column,” Times Editor John Solomon said in the announcement that the paper and the senator had “mutually agreed to end his weekly column.”