The Washington Times is suspending Sen. Rand Paul’s weekly column after the Kentucky senator “failed to properly source material in published writings,” including in his column for the publication.
“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,” Washington Times editor John Solomon said in an article on the newspaper’s website Tuesday.
The paper reports that the decision to end Paul’s weekly column was a mutual agreement between the senator and the newspaper.
Accusations of plagiarism were first brought to light last week when MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reported on her show that Paul had copied and pasted from Wikipedia—oftentimes word for word—in a recent speech. Since then, BuzzFeed and Politico have discovered several instances of plagiarism in Paul’s work–from a column in the Washington Times to his own book.
The Kentucky senator, and rumored 2016 presidential hopeful, has defended his work over the last week in several television interviews, including on CNN Tuesday night where he continued to argue he was being held to a different standard than others. “Did we make mistakes? Yeah, I’m the first to admit that I’m imperfect. But at the same time, I do get offended when people try to cast aspersions on my character, because I’m honest,” he said.
In an interview with the National Review Wednesday, Paul said he never intended to mislead Americans, and continued his attack on the “hacks and haters” in the media. “I’m being criticized for not having proper attribution, and yet they are able to write stuff that if I were their journalism teacher in college, I would fail them,” he said.
Traci Lee