US Senator plagiarized master's degree from Army War College

A United States Senator seems to have plagiarized large portions of the paper he had to write to attain his master's degree from the United States Army War College.

The New York Times reports that Senator John Walsh, a Democrat from Minnesota, plagiarized from various sources that can be accessed online with relative ease. The sources include academic papers, books, and publications with a focus on international policy.

The plagiarism was part of a crucial exercise to attain a master's degree from the Army War College. The college calls the work a "strategy research project." The focus of Walsh's paper was advancing democracy to help meet and secure other national security prerogatives, according to the Times.

Each of the six policy proscriptions laid out by Walsh in his 14-page paper, "The Case for Democracy as a Long Term National Strategy," are nearly identical to a similar paper written on the idea by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The Times cites Walsh's third policy point, which is a sentence that appears identically in both Walsh's essay and the Carnegie paper.

Other sections of the paper appear to be taken verbatim from a researcher at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, a research facility located at Harvard University in Massachusetts.

In addition to outright stealing some of the words and ideas in his paper, other portions of the paper are improperly attributed to their original source.

Walsh took office by gubernatorial appointment in early 2014 after being appointed to the position after the previous senator, Max Baucus, was tapped to be the ambassador to China.

Walsh served in Iraq from 2004 to 2005. An aide of Walsh's suggested that the rigors of combat and stresses of adjusting to civilian life may have played a role in Walsh's actions. The aide pointed out that a member of Walsh's unit committed suicide in 2007, just weeks before the paper was due.