Vaughn Ward lost the Republican nomination for Congress in Idaho after a damning video surfaced showing him delivering a speech with lines seemingly taken almost verbatim from a well-known address by President Obama. Now a television station in the state says that Ward ripped more text in the same speech from another congressional candidate.
KTVB in Boise has learned that Ward’s speech contained not just lines that were apparently lifted from Obama’s 2004 Democratic National Convention address, but also lines from a speech given by Pat Meehan, a Republican congressional candidate in Pennsylvania. (READ OR WATCH MEEHAN AND WARD’S SPEECHES SIDE-BY-SIDE)
Soon after his defeat, Ward told The Daily Caller that the video alleging plagiarism “wasn’t true” and was unfairly edited. He blamed the media in Idaho for not conducting “due diligence” before running reports on the matter.
Jim Gilchriest, the executive news director at KTVB in Boise, said in an e-mail that Ward’s comments to The Daily Caller in the days after his loss were the impetus for the follow-up investigation that led to the discovery of the additional lifted lines. Gilchriest took issue with Ward’s prior contention that “the largest station in our state headlined this story and played the propaganda video over and over,” saying that wasn’t true for KTVB, who only played it once on the eve of the primary.
According to Gilchriest’s new report, the station learned of the additional lines from Meehan’s speech from a website that specializes in detecting plagiarism.
Ward, who was endorsed by Sarah Palin, did not immediately return a request for comment. He would not address the new plagiarism accusation to KTVB.