Kentucky Senator Rand Paul answered claims that he plagiarized material in his speeches, a book and an opinion article for The Washington Times, admitting that "mistakes were made," The New York Times reported. Paul also announced "that he had been instituting safeguards at his office to prevent further breaches from happening again," The New York Times also reported.
Up until Tuesday, the Libertarian senator struck a defiant tone against critics who "cast aspersions on [his] character."
"What we are going to do from here forward, if it will make people leave me the hell alone, is we're going to do them like college papers. We're going to try to put out footnotes... we have made mistakes," but that they had "never been intentional. This is coming from haters to begin with because they want the implication to be out there that you're dishonest... [which] bleeds over into regular press," he said, according to The New York Times.
Some of the speeches Paul had been accused of not attributing to source material include certain books by Ray Bradbury to the film "Gattaca." Passages from Wikipedia were also lifted. Also an article Paul wrote for The Washington Times in September "on mandatory minimum prison sentences appeared to have copied language from an essay that had been published in the magazine The Week," The New York Times reported.
The Washington Times has canceled his column.
"Ultimately, I'm the boss, and things go under my name, so it's my fault. I never had intentionally presented anyone's ideas as my own.Did we make mistakes? Yeah. I'm the first to admit I'm imperfect. But I do get offended when people try to cast aspersions on my character because I'm honest. I've never tried to mislead people," Paul conceded Tuesday on CNN.
Buzzfeed, the online news site, said it uncovered a passage in Paul's book, "Government Bullies," which is identical to a portion of a Forbes magazine article, The Courier-Journal reported.
"This is what it looks like when you move from having just a Kentucky profile or just a Capitol Hill profile to building a national profile," said Kevin Madden, a communications aide to Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, also reported by The New York Times.
Doug Stafford, Paul's spokesman, said that the office intends to be more careful with lifting passages, and will attribute the sources.
"Going forward, footnotes will be available on request. There have also been occasions where quotations or typesetting indentations have been left out through errors in our approval process. From here forward, quoting, footnoting and citing will be more complete," Stafford said.
