The New York Times accused Montana Sen. John Walsh of plagiarism on Wednesday in a research paper he wrote for his master's degree.
In the NY Times report, the Democratic senator wrote the paper back in 2007 while finishing his master's degree at the United States Army War College. The Times laid out exactly how much of the final paper contains either improper or no attribution at all, including nearly an entire page.
In a thesis paper about the United States' Middle East policy, the six recommendations he offers at the end are all taken from a document written by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which he has cited several times previously throughout the paper.
The paper, titled "The Case for Democracy as a Long Term National Strategy," takes no time getting into the plagiarism as his very first sentence, which he pulls almost word-for-word from Thomas Carothers' article "Promoting Democracy And Fighting Terror," isn't his and was written back in 2003 for Foreign Affairs.
In perhaps the most egregious theft, Walsh uses nearly 600 words in one section pulled from a Harvard paper, citations and all.
Walsh initially denied the claims on Wednesday when confronted by the Times saying, "I didn't do anything intentional here." He also noted that he doesn't believe he actual plagiarized saying, "I don't believe I did, no."
Later, his campaign spokeswoman Lauren Passalacqua said, "This was unintentional and it was a mistake," in a statement, USA Today reports. "There were areas that should have been cited differently but it was completely unintentional."