National Journal is accusing GOP congressional candidate Carl DeMaio (CA) of plagiarizing its own year-old report on pension double-dipping by congressmen —not the first time DeMaio’s been accused of lifting someone else’s work and passing it off as his own.
Under the headline “California Republican Appears to Plagiarize to Make Case Against Opponent,” National Journal reported that DeMaio’s report on congressional lawmakers who take a government pension in addition to their normal congressional salaries “looks like little more than a copied-and-pasted version of a National Journal database that accompanied a cover story last June on congressional double-dipping.” The similarities included text and abbreviations and went “right down to the color scheme.”
Actually, this isn’t the first time that DeMaio, the likely GOP nominee to unseat Scott Peters (D-CA), has been accused of lifting work done by somebody else. The Voice of San Diego reminded readers Monday that prior to DeMaio coming to San Diego, when he was in working in Washington, D.C., he allegedly copied a competitor’s website “down to its color scheme.”
As the Voice of San Diego reported in 2012:
In 2003, Christopher Wye was planning a major conference on government performance for a center he ran as part of the federally chartered National Academy of Public Administration. Wye said he woke up one morning to find that The Performance Institute had decided to plan its own competing conference and had replicated Wye’s entire website down to its color scheme.
Wye decided to add embossed gold seals to his conference literature and gold seals on his website. They read: “The Original Performance Conference.”
(DeMaio denied copying the website and called the anecdote sour grapes from a competitor.)
In May 2012, then San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders, a fellow Republican, joked that DeMaio made a habit of taking credit for things he shouldn’t take credit for. Sanders made the comments at a news conference when a reporter asked him about DeMaio taking credit for certain financial reforms.
“He probably takes credit for my weight loss,” Sanders said. “He probably takes credit for the weeds I pulled in the backward last week. It’s all bulls—.”
DeMaio communications director Dave McCulloch told TPM Monday that it was “completely absurd” to suggest DeMaio has engaged in a pattern of such conduct.
In a separate statement McCulloch said that DeMaio has a long history on the issue of pension double dipping and that the report DeMaio released was different from the National Journal report, but that he should have “recognized their previous reporting in our report.”
“Carl DeMaio has issued reports on Double Dipping in Pensions since 2004 – and in 2010 he created a Hall of Shame report targeting state and local politicians in California who have been double dipping,” the statement read. “As Carl takes his pension reform efforts national, the campaign expanded his list to include Members of Congress, using publicly available data including Member Financial Interest Disclosures and the previous reporting done by National Journal.”
