Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke dismissed the latest examples of her campaign plagiarizing text from a variety sources for her jobs plan, rural communities plan, and veterans plan.
Speaking Monday morning with Wisconsin NPR-affiliate station WUWM's show Lake Effect Burke said the copied text in her plans were small instances.
"The thing that was wrong was that Eric used some very similar language, some exact words that he had used in other plans that he had provided to other campaigns," Burke said of campaign consultant Eric Schnurer. "And that's wrong, and that's why we cut ties with his firm."
A spokesman for the Burke campaign placed blame Thursday on an "expert" named Eric Schnurer for the similar text.
BuzzFeed News reported Friday that Burke's economic plan "Invest for Success" copied nearly-verbatim sections from the jobs plans of Ward Cammack, who ran for Tennessee governor in 2009 before withdrawing from the race, a 2008 plan from Delaware Gov. Jack Markell, now-Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe's plan from his failed-2009 bid, and John Gregg who ran for governor of Indiana in 2012 and lost to Mike Pence.
Another section takes the same language as a White House press release and a small section of language is copied from a Harvard report.
On Sunday, BuzzFeed News reported the additional instances of copied text in her plans.
Asked about BuzzFeed News' latest report that Burke had copied language from a variety of sources including academic journals and reports, a local newspaper column, and others the Wisconsin Democrat dismissed the instances as "very small" and "extremely limited" passages.
"My jobs plan is about 45 pages long," Burke said. "In addition, I've put out a rural plan on how we can make sure that rural communities around the statement are growing and thriving -- which has been a real issue. We've lost nearly 9,000 farms over a five-year period of time. I want to make sure that the people of Wisconsin understand the type of governor and the plans I have for moving the state forward."
Burke insisted she was merely drawing from "best practices and innovative ideas that are working in other parts of the country."
"I am going to draw on best practices and innovative ideas that are working in other parts of the country," she said. "But these plans are very in depth and what has been identified are very small passages, scattered throughout that, that have, uh, maybe been used in other plans that this consultant developed. This is something that is extremely limited and the main bulk of this work is work that I have been deeply involved with. And there not ideas in those plans unless I thought that they were great ideas for Wisconsin on how we're going to move our economy forward."
Four of the candidates Burke was shown to have copied lost their respective races.