Rand Paul's Washington Times Column Put To An End Amid Plagiarism Charges

The Washington Times Ends Rand Paul's Column

The Washington Times put an end to Sen. Rand Paul's (R-Ky.) weekly column on Tuesday following a number of plagiarism charges against his written and oral works.

Paul was most recently accused of borrowing heavily from The Week's Dan Stewart in his September column on mandatory minimum drug sentences.

The Washington Times added an editor's note to the beginning of the piece after BuzzFeed reported the similarities:

Portions of the following article should have been attributed to “Rethinking mandatory sentencing,” an article written by Dan Stewart that appeared in The Week on Sept. 14, 2013.

The Washington Times announced that the publication and the senator "mutually" agreed to put an end to his weekly column:

The newspaper and the senator mutually agreed to end his weekly column, which has appeared on each Friday in the newspaper since the summer.

...

Mr. Paul has been a prolific op-ed writer in recent years, penning hundreds of pieces in The Times and other media outlets. But the body of his work is getting fresh attention from journalists as they uncover multiple cases of lifting other people’s work without giving them credit.

Paul said in a New York Times interview on Tuesday that he would not be firing anyone, but planned a "restructuring" of his staff and a different approach in the future.

"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," he said Tuesday. "We’re going to try to put out footnotes. We’re going to have them available. If people want to request the footnoted version, we’re going to have it available."

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