Wolf admits part of jobs plan plagiarized

If there’s one issue you’d expect the Tom Wolf campaign to have a thoughtful and original position paper on, it would be jobs and economic development, since Wolf’s business background is a key element of his pitch to Democratic voters in the Pennsylvania gubernatorial primary.

But the Wolf campaign has acknowledged that four paragraphs in Wolf’s “Fresh Start” plan for Pennsylvania are plagiarized from materials produced by Johnson Controls, an energy equipment distributor.

“This was a mistake and we regret it,” Wolf campaign spokesman Mark Nicastre said in a statement. “The language that has been pointed out should never have appeared in the manner in which it did. We are putting processes in place to make sure this does not happen again.”

The Wolf campaign was alerted to the problem by helpful researchers at the campaign of Allyson Schwartz, which sent an email to reporters midday Thursday.

“Tom Wolf claims to be a different type of candidate,” said Mark Bergman, spokesman for the Schwartz campaign in the release. “He says he will take us in a new direction with a ‘Fresh Start’ policy, yet the words aren’t even his own. Pennsylvanians deserve some honest straight answers from Tom Wolf for once.”

The Schwartz campaign statement said Johnson Controls “has tens of millions of dollars in state government contracts.”

Nicastre said in his statement that the Wolf plan draws on a variety of sources.

“This plan specifically cites more than 20 references throughout the 46-page document to other studies and articles that served as some of the foundation to our plan,” Nicastre said. “It was important to us to give credit where credit was due.”

Nicastre said in a later statement that the person responsible for the plagiarism has been terminated.You can read the Schwartz release with the plagiarized text here.