No one to be fired after Melania Trump speech plagiarism episode
Donald Trump's presidential campaign doesn't plan to fire anybody or to take disciplinary action over the controversy surrounding Melania Trump's plagiarism of Michelle Obama, CNN learned Tuesday.
Trump's campaign hopes to simply move on without further addressing questions about the speech.
Aides to the presumptive Republican nominee are scrambling to move past the imbroglio after a passage in Melania Trump's speech Monday night, which headlined the Republican National Convention's opening night, closely mirrored a portion of Michelle Obama's address to the Democratic National Convention in 2008.
It's set off infighting and finger-pointing within Trump's campaign, and two sources told CNN that Donald Trump himself is furious about it.
Trump's aides chalked the controversy up to media bias and blamed Hillary Clinton's campaign -- even though the apparent plagiarism was discovered by an independent journalist and had gone viral before Clinton's allies and Democrats even weighed in.
In an interview with CNN's Chris Cuomo on "New Day," campaign chairman Paul Manafort denied the allegations of plagiarism.
"To think that she would do something like that knowing how scrutinized her speech was going to be last night is just really absurd," Manafort said.
Manafort said the words Melania used were not "cribbed" but are common words.
"There's no cribbing of Michelle Obama's speech. These were common words and values. She cares about her family," Manafort said. "To think that she'd be cribbing Michelle Obama's words is crazy."
Sean Spicer, the Republican National Committee's chief strategist, invoked "My Little Pony" in defending the speech in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer.
"Melania Trump said, 'the strength of your dreams and willingness to work for them.' Twilight Sparkle from 'My Little Pony' said, 'This is your dream. Anything you can do in your dreams, you can do now,' " Spicer said.
He also compared passages of Trump's speech with phrases from musicians John Legend and Kid Rock.
"I mean if we want to take a bunch of phrases and run them through a Google and say, 'Hey, who else has said them,' I can do that in five minutes," Spicer said. "And that's what this is."
However, Trump's campaign faced criticism even from allies, who largely blamed staffers -- not Melania Trump.
Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said Tuesday that whoever is responsible for writing the should be fired.
"Whoever was the staff person who wrote this speech should be held accountable and should be fired," Lewandowski told CNN's John Berman and Kate Bolduan.
Lewandowski, who is a CNN contributor, was fired from the Trump campaign last month.
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said at a Bloomberg Politics event Tuesday morning he'd "probably" fire whoever was responsible for including plagiarized quotes, though he added: "It all kinda depends on the circumstances and how these things are written."
The controversy quickly overshadowed the speech, which was to have been her introduction to voters. It focused on her immigration to the United States and her love for her husband.
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The Trump campaign released a statement on the speech after the similarities were uncovered, but it did not mention the plagiarism charge.
"In writing her beautiful speech, Melania's team of writers took notes on her life's inspirations, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thinking. Melania's immigrant experience and love for America shone through in her speech, which made it such a success," according to Jason Miller, the senior communications adviser.
New Jersey governor and Donald Trump ally Chris Christie defended the speech, saying, "There's no way that Melania Trump was plagiarizing Michelle Obama's speech."
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"I just don't see it," Christie told CNN's Jamie Gangel in an interview Tuesday, adding later, "If we're talking about 7% of a speech, that was really, universally considered to be a good performance by Melania. I know her. There's no way that Melania Trump was plagiarizing Michelle Obama's speech."
