Policy analyst 'glad' McInnis used his words

A man whose words were reportedly plagiarized by GOP gubernatorial hopeful Scott McInnis said Wednesday that he’s happy that McInnis used his work.

Daryl Plunk, a former policy analyst with the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington, D.C., said he worked for months in 1994 to help craft then-congressman McInnis’ position on the North Korean nuclear threat.

And when McInnis used language Plunk had offered in an opinion piece and a speech, “I was glad,” he said.

“That’s what you live for as a policy analyst,” Plunk said in a phone interview from Virginia, where he lives.

McInnis, who served 12 years in Congress representing the Western Slope, is locked in a GOP primary with Evergreen businessman Dan Maes. The Republican winner will face Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, in the governor’s race. The primary is Aug. 10.

McInnis apologized Tuesday for using passages crafted by a Colorado judge without attribution in essays on water rights that he wrote during a fellowship that paid $300,000.

On Wednesday, the Denver Post reported that it also found similarities between Plunk’s work at Heritage and a McInnis opinion piece and speech on North Korea.

Plunk said that’s because he wrote the passages for McInnis.

“In the writing process, I offered to contribute and they accepted,” Plunk said. “I gave him text, which is nothing unusual.”
Plunk said he has no interest in McInnis’ gubernatorial ambitions.

In Washington, politicians frequently rely on assistants to write speeches and opinion pieces offered to newspapers. Plunk said offering help to those writers was his goal.

“We were spreading our news, spreading our ideas,” he said.

While Plunk’s statements may clear McInnis in one plagiarism incident, the candidate is not denying problems with the papers he penned on water rights.
In a statement released Tuesday, McInnis acknowledged that those papers contained passages by state Supreme Court Justice Gregory Hobbs.

“Regrettably, it has now become clear that much of the research was in fact taken from other source material without proper attribution. While I do not believe that this was a deliberate act, it was a serious mistake,” McInnis said in a statement. “It’s unacceptable, it’s inexcusable, but it was also unintentional.”

On Wednesday, McInnis said he’s focusing on issues beyond plagiarism.

“The issue most people are concerned about now is family, jobs, the economy,” McInnis said.

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The Associated Press contributed to this report