Arizona Dem governor candidate's top staffer plagiarized his US congress campaign website

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Gubernatorial candidate David Garcia touts borderless agenda.

The political director of Arizona's Democratic candidate for governor plagiarized significant portions of his campaign website when he ran for U.S. Congress, blaming an outside consultant for the copying and pasting, Fox News can reveal.

Billy Kovacs, the newly-appointed political director for David Garcia’s campaign, unsuccessfully ran for Congress earlier this year, finishing fifth out of seven Democrats in the party’s primary in August with less than 5,000 votes.

Garcia, who will face off against Governor Doug Ducey in November, celebrated the appointment of Kovacs, who touted himself as an “authentic, genuine” candidate, saying “his youth, energy, and passion for Arizona was felt throughout his campaign, and he will be a great addition as we fight to turn Arizona blue.”

But Fox News can reveal that Kovacs’ campaign website plagiarized comments at least 14 times from former President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, other lawmakers, and media outlets.

“As a small business owner I see firsthand that small businesses are the backbone of our economy and the cornerstone of our communities,” Kovacs wrote on his campaign website. The line is plagiarized from Obama’s 2010 remarks.

“We should be doing everything we can to make voting easier – not harder,” the campaign website stated. The exact sentence was previously uttered by Clinton in 2015.

Kovacs’ liberal borrowing of phrases also includes an exact comment from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who said the Internet “belongs to the people, and we must keep it free, open, and equally accessible for all.”

David Garcia's political director plagiarized comments by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer

In an interview with Fox News, Kovacs admitted his responsibility for the error in using the exact lines from others, but said an outside consultant provided the lines to the campaign to allign his campaign with the mainstream Democratic Party messaging.

“At the start of my campaign, we were provided messaging documents from an outside consultant. I used these documents regularly in the course of my campaign for various purposes and used the suggested messaging language for social media, as that was the intent. I did not know it was verbatim copy that others had used but it was given to me for the express purpose of aligning my campaign with national messaging," he said in a statement.

Fox News has also identified at least four instances of Kovacs’ campaign website plagiarizing Mike Levin, a Democratic candidate in California running to unseat an incumbent Republican.

“I will always stand for women’s health issues, including access to contraception and the right to make one’s own reproductive choices. I believe that only a woman, her family, and her doctor should be able to decide what is best for her health,” read Garcia’s political director’s website in 2018, plagiarizing the exact phrasing from Levin’s website in 2017.

“We cannot allow our seniors to go without health care or fall into poverty and homelessness,” Kovacs’ site read, borrowing from Levin’s campaign website that stated “Our great nation cannot allow its seniors to go without healthcare or fall into poverty and homelessness.”

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Kovacs’ website also features a few instances of plagiarism from media outlets, including plagiarizing an Atlantic magazine article in 2015.

“In today's economy, a high school degree no longer guarantees a middle-class income, so Obama properly wants to update the country's social contract to make two years of college, not just high school, something students receive at public expense,” wrote Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation.

On the campaign website, Kovacs stated the following: “We need to properly update our country’s social contract to make two years of college, not just high school, something students receive at public expense.”

The Garcia campaign has been embarrassed by campaign staffers previously, despite claims that every new hire is being carefully vetted.

"The slow motion train wreck that is David Garcia's campaign takes another disastrous turn. First he had to fire a staffer for tweeting hateful rhetoric toward law enforcement and America. Now this? It shows Garcia is completely incapable of running even a small-scale campaign, let alone be governor," said Arizona Republican Party Spokeswoman Ayshia Connors.

Connors was referring to Xenia Orona, the campaign’s former digital director until last August, who was ousted from the campaign after her offensive social media posts resurfaced. She reportedly called the U.S. a “sh—hole country” and threw her support behind the “abolish ICE” movement.

Garcia's email marketing team is also getting flak for repeated typos, bad grammar, incorrect facts like stating Garcia will be the first Latino elected “to high office in Arizona” and sending out a fundraiser email titled “David Garcia for Congress” despite running for the state’s governorship.