From the Democratic Party of Virginia:
New Report: Jen Kiggans Caught Plagiarizing Elaine Luria With ‘Really Bizarre’ Email
Richmond, VA — Scott Taylor isn’t the only Republican from Virginia’s second congressional district with a fraud problem. Virginia State Senator Jen Kiggans is taking after her fellow Republican with a controversy of her own — plagiarizing an op-ed by Elaine Luria and passing it off as her own arguments to raise money for her campaign.
As reported by the Daily Beast Friday, Kiggans wrote a fundraising email that copied an op-ed by Luria arguing for more defense spending to counter China’s military buildup. Even stranger, Kiggans then tried to argue that Luria disagreed with this strategy. As one plagiarism expert put it while examining Kiggans’s email, her move was “really bizarre.”
See below for key excerpts and read the full article here.
- “But it may be an entirely different universe of hypocrisy to misrepresent your opponent’s position and attack them using their own arguments and words—not as in throwing their words back at them and refuting their arguments, but as in actually taking their words and presenting them as your own.”
- “Jen Kiggans, the top Republican candidate in a pivotal House race next year, recently sent out a fundraising email dinging her opponent as part of a Democratic coalition that doesn’t ‘put America first’ and will ‘cower to China.’ That email, however, would likely receive a failing grade in a classroom; it lifts key phrases from her Democratic opponent.”
- “Kiggans, in the attempt to pillory her political rival—two-term incumbent Rep. Elaine Luria (D-VA)—actually agrees with her, and appears to have stolen language directly from a Wall Street Journal op-ed Luria published four days prior to the email blast.”
- “Kiggans, a Virginia state senator, makes the same overall argument—many of them in strikingly similar language to Luria’s. She claims this stance sets her apart from elected Democrats who ‘don’t seem to share that perspective,’ while ignoring that Luria does, in fact, share that perspective. Sometimes down to the very word.”
- “And, in the most egregious example of potential plagiarism, where the op-ed says, ‘China has an extensive ground-based conventional missile force,’ the Kiggans fundraising email states, ‘they have built extensive ground-based conventional missile forces.’ That phrase is not a military term of art or commonly used expression. A closed-quote Google search for ‘extensive ground-based conventional missile force’ only returned one hit: Luria’s op-ed.”
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