POLITICS OR DID RAND SCREW THE POOCH?: Washington Times Ends Rand Paul Column Amid Plagiarism Allegations

Sen. Rand Paul acknowledged Tuesday that he had failed to properly source material in published writings, including a column in The Washington Times, after a string of embarrassing plagiarism accusations surfaced in recent days.

Mr. Paul took personal responsibility for the oversights, which he and aides said were caused by staff providing him background materials that were not properly footnoted. But the Kentucky Republican, a possible 2016 White House candidate, also said he was being held by the news media to a higher standard than other politicians.

“The standard I’m being held to is a little different than everybody else,” Mr. Paul said on CNN’s “The Situation Room.” “They’re now going back and reading every book from cover to cover and looking for places where we footnoted correctly and don’t have quotation marks in the right places or we didn’t indent correctly.”

The Washington Times said Tuesday that it had independently reviewed Mr. Paul’s columns and op-eds and published a correction to his Sept. 20 column in which the senator had failed to attribute a passage that first appeared in Forbes.

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