GOP group leaked news of Walsh plagiarism

The National Republican Senatorial Committee leaked to the New York Times an analysis showing that Sen. John Walsh had plagiarized much of his final paper at the Army War College, according to a report Thursday by Politico.

The Washington-based news organization sponsored a Politico Playbook lunch Thursday at which the executive directors of the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spoke and fielded questions.

The NRSC did the research, discovered Walsh’s plagiarism and turned it over to a New York Times reporter, the committee’s executive director Rob Collins said at the Politico event.

The New York Times published a story about Walsh’s plagiarism on July 23. It created an outcry among some people in Montana, with some newspapers calling on him to quit his Senate campaign.

Walsh dropped out of the race Aug. 7, saying the plagiarism allegations had been a distraction to his Senate campaign against Republican Rep. Steve Daines. Later in August, Democrats selected state Rep. Amanda Curtis of Butte as their new Senate candidate.

At the Politico event Thursday, Collins said he decided to boost the Republican committee’s spending for more opposition research this election cycle on Democratic incumbents, but also to check on Republicans who were looking to run.

He said an NRSC opposition researcher, Mark McLaughlin, discovered the Walsh plagiarism.

The Politico article quoted Collins saying what caught the researcher’s attention was “a very, very pro-Bush ‘neo-con’ thesis that Sen. Walsh had written” at the Army War College in 2007.

The researcher ran Walsh’s paper through an online plagiarism detection service, “and the entire last five pages of it turned bright red,” Politico quoted Collins saying. “It was pretty dead-to-rights plagiarism.”

After an investigation by the college’s review board and an unsuccessful appeal by Walsh, the Army War College on Oct. 10 rescinded Walsh’s master’s degree.

A spokesman for Walsh’s former campaign declined comment on the news Thursday.

During the presentations at the Politico lunch, Guy Cecil, executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, was asked how his committee missed Walsh’s plagiarism when it vetted him as a candidate.

Cecil said the DSCC missed the Walsh plagiarism just like the NRSC missed an Oregon Republican Senate candidate who plagiarized the issues pages on her campaign website.

“We don’t go through and research every single writing that happened since the beginning of time,” Politico quoted Cecil saying. “Both sides have struggled in dealing with this.”