A spokesman for Nuciforo's campaign said the campaign didn't mean to blame a past staffer in a previous interview and is taking full responsibility for the situation.
Pittsfield native and 1st Congressional District candidate Andrea Nuciforo Jr. and his campaign took full responsibility Friday evening for policy papers published on his website which were copied or borrowed without attribution from other Democrats. More politics news
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The campaign of Andrea Nuciforo Jr., a former state senator and the current Berkshire Middle District Register of Deeds, is now taking full responsibility for policy papers published on their website that were copied or heavily borrowed from other Democratic politicians without attribution.
In a phone call to The Republican following a report published at 4:57 p.m. Friday, Patrick Tool, spokesman for 1st Congressional District candidate Nuciforo, said the campaign didn't mean to blame a past staffer in a previous interview and is taking full responsibility for the situation.
"We're taking full responsibility for the oversight as a campaign and have made changes to the website to reflect that," Tool said in a phone interview. "The responsibility rests entirely with us."
Earlier in the day, the campaign had told the newspaper that a past staffer who was charged with overseeing the staff that crafted and put the positions online held responsibility for the apparent plagiarism. The past staffer, who asked that his name not be published, was tracked down and said that he previously worked on the John Edwards presidential campaign and had given Nuciforo's staff links to the published papers, not expecting them to go so far as to copy whole sections and present them as Nuciforo's own ideas. He took responsibility for not double checking their work.
Nuciforo's website was revamped on Friday with the questionable entries being taken down, reworked and republished.
The controversy began on Thursday afternoon when Bill Shein, one of Nuciforo's rivals in the race, sent an email to reporters pointing out six sections of Nuciforo's campaign website that he said were plagiarized from other Democrats, including Edwards, a former presidential candidate, former U.S. Senate candidate Alan Khazei of Brookline and Stacey Lawson, a Democratic congressional candidate in California’s 2nd district.
Nuciforo, who is in a three-way Democratic primary against Shein and U.S. Rep. Richard Neal, D-Springfield, to represent the new 1st Congressional District, initially brushed off concerns that sections on his website were copied from Edwards' positions published during his 2008 campaign and other sections of his site were quite similar to those published by Khazei and Lawson.
The about-face Friday evening comes as the campaign prepares for two debates with less than a month before voters decide which man will represent the new district, which incorporates all of Berkshire County, all but one precinct of Hampden County and parts of Hampshire, Franklin and Worcester counties. No Republican challengers emerged in the race.
Nuciforo's campaign isn't the first to be accused of taking the ideas of another and presenting them as their own, and it likely won't be the last.
In October, Republican U.S. Sen. Scott Brown's website was found to have a passage that contained several sentences which were verbatim remarks delivered by ex-North Carolina Senator Elizabeth Dole in 2002. At the time, Brown's Senate office in Washington attributed the similarities to his website being based off of the template of Dole's website.
The words were removed and Brown moved on to today, where he is running a close race against Warren.
During the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, candidate Hillary Clinton accused then-candidate Barack Obama of lifting parts of a speech delivered in Milwaukee, Wisc., from Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.
Once the allegations hit the news, Obama said that he and Patrick, a longtime friend, wrote the speech together, and he acknowledged that he should have credited him. But before long, Obama moved past the plagiarism allegation and went on to become president of the United States.
Another incident dates back to the 1988 presidential campaign by then-U.S. Sen. Joe Biden, who was found to have taken without credit portions of a speech by Neil Kinnock, leader of the British Labour Party. When media reports emerged about the similarities between the two speeches, Biden didn't address the controversy head-on, and further reports emerged that he had borrowed without attribution from Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey.
The response to the plagiarism stories are partially credited for ending Biden's 1988 presidential run, although 20 years later, Biden ended up becoming a vice president to serve alongside Obama in the current administration.
