Yet another Trump official has recycled somebody else’s words
Editor’s note
(about 2 hours later)
You can say that again.
This file is no longer available.
And again.
And again.
And again.
The Trump team has happened upon a novel way to save time and energy: reusing words already written by other people.
First, Melania Trump lifted from a speech that had been delivered by Michelle Obama.
Then, Monica Crowley backed out of a senior position on Trump’s National Security Council after evidence of plagiarism was found in her book, columns and PhD dissertation.
During Scott Pruitt’s confirmation hearings to head the Environmental Protection Agency, senators brought up that as Oklahoma’s attorney general, Pruitt took most of a letter sent to him by an oil company, put it on his own official letterhead and sent it to the EPA.
And now we have another case of borrowed prose — by none other than the man who is now White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn. On Nov. 19, 2015, McGahn, then a lawyer with the firm Jones Day representing the Trump campaign, filed a brief with the Federal Election Commission that was essentially a cut-and-paste of a brief filed by another respondent 15 days earlier. A chunk of more than 300 words, essentially the entire analysis, is a word-for-word reproduction of the other brief.
Election-law experts I spoke with said that what McGahn did is not illegal but is unusual. Because the filings were not public at the time, the duplication of the briefs also makes it clear that the Trump campaign’s lawyer coordinated with the other respondent in the case, which is also permitted but can sometimes raise suspicion with regulators.
The campaign-law experts I consulted said there was nothing to stop the two parties from filing a brief jointly, which makes it odd that McGahn would file one under his name virtually identical to one already filed. “It is not common practice for a major law firm to cut and paste someone else’s work product,” one of the nation’s top election-law practitioners, a Republican, told me Tuesday.
The filings, made public by the FEC last week on the eve of the inauguration, are a postscript to one of the stranger tales of the campaign: the hiring of actors, reportedly for $50 apiece, to cheer at Trump’s June 2015 kickoff event at Trump Tower, and the campaign’s failure to pay the firm that helped organize the event, Gotham Government Relations. The Trump campaign eventually paid up, after a complaint was filed with the FEC alleging an in-kind contribution to Trump from Gotham. The FEC decided the stakes involved — the interest on $12,000 — did not merit action.
Apparently Trump’s lawyers didn’t think it worth their trouble, either. Rather than submitting a joint brief with Gotham, McGahn merely repeated Gotham’s words.
“The Complaint is legally deficient and must be dismissed because it fails to clearly and concisely recite any verifiable facts that constitute a violation of the Act or Commission regulations,” Andrew Herman, of the firm Miller & Chevalier, wrote for Gotham.
“The Complaint is legally deficient and must be dismissed because it fails to clearly and concisely recite any verifiable facts that constitute a violation of the Act or Commission regulations,” McGahn wrote for Trump.
“The Complaint is nothing more than an attempt to shift the burden to the Respondents through the use of innuendo and conjecture,” Herman wrote.
“The Complaint is nothing more than an attempt to shift the burden to the Respondents through the use of innuendo and conjecture,” McGahn wrote.
“At best, the Complaint is nothing more than a few sensationalized and erroneous news reports dressed up as a complaint,” Herman wrote.
“At best, the Complaint is nothing more than a few sensationalized and erroneous news reports dressed up as a complaint,” McGahn wrote.
And so on. In one case, McGahn’s brief dropped a word but left the comma that followed it, garbling the sentence.
My inquiry with the White House press office received no response.
Melanie Sloane, a consultant and longtime ethics watchdog, found the nearly identical briefs while reading FEC filings and alerted me to the similarities. “It’s ironic that the person now overseeing ethics in the White House may himself have engaged in unethical conduct by plagiarizing another lawyer’s work,” she said.
A more benign explanation is that the lawyers worked on the brief together, as they’re allowed to do, and then for reasons unclear decided to make separate filings. But after four incidents of borrowed language, including one involving the top White House lawyer, Trump’s team might dot their i’s and cross their t’s — and make sure the words they use are their own.
Twitter: @Milbank
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