These days, though, de Borchgrave is involved in some less praiseworthy pursuits. Alongside his other activities, the veteran newsman is a columnist for the Washington Times, the influential conservative broadsheet, where he once served as editor in chief. And in a handful of columns over the last year he has lifted passages verbatim, or nearly verbatim, from the Internet and other sources, without attribution — a fact the Washington Times’ leadership tried to sweep under the rug, according to insiders at the paper.

The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple first noticed de Borchgrave’s apparent plagiarism on Wednesday, but there are plenty more examples. Take, for instance, this bit, which ran in de Borchgrave’s May 9 column:

Under the 10-year agreement, U.S. forces would have access to Afghan bases beyond 2014 for training Afghans and hunting al Qaeda….The administration commits to request Congress each year to help pay for Afghanistan’s security forces, whose costs far outstrip Kabul’s budget….

The language closely mirrors a Christian Science Monitor blog post that ran the previous day:

Under the 10-year agreement, U.S. forces would have access to Afghan bases beyond 2014 for training Afghans and hunting Al Qaeda. The US commits to ask Congress annually to help pay for Afghanistan’s security forces, whose cost outstrips the country’s budget.

Another example can be found in de Borchgrave’s April 25 column, “The Global House of Cards”:

It would take a military jet flying at the speed of sound, reeling out a roll of dollar bills behind it, 14 years before it reeled out one trillion dollar bills. Or, if that’s too hard to grasp, one trillion dollars, laid end to end, could make a chain that stretches from Earth to the moon and back — 200 times.

It appears to be drawn almost word for word from a post that appeared on the conservative blog 100777.com in 2003. (Variations have also appeared elsewhere in the blogosphere.):

If you laid one dollar bills end to end, you could make a chain that stretches from earth to the moon and back again 200 times before you ran out of dollar bills!…It would take a military jet flying at the speed of sound, reeling out a roll of dollar bills behind it, 14 years before it reeled out one trillion dollar bills.

According to four Times officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, the paper’s management has known about de Borchgrave’s pilfering for months. Editors in the paper’s Commentary section, where the octogenarian columnist’s work ran until earlier this year, first stumbled on the problem last July, when de Borchgrave wrote a column about Council on Foreign Relations president Richard N. Haass. It included unattributed passages that were drawn almost word for word from Haass’ writing. At this point, the section’s editors decided to give de Borchgrave the benefit of the doubt, in part because of his stature at the paper, and in part because Haass’ words were attributed to him elsewhere in the column. “It was feasible in this situation that he could have accidentally dropped some quote marks,” explains one person familiar with the matter.

Still, they began combing through de Borchgrave’s work for signs of plagiarism. By September, they had turned up another suspect column. Here’s one passage, followed by an excerpt from the online publication Electronic Intifada:

Residents of Khallet Zakariya, located in Area C south of Bethlehem, complained last month to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs that Israeli authorities are demolishing their homes and settlers destroying their livelihoods in an effort to force the community to relocate.

***

Residents of Khallet Zakariya, located in Area C south of Bethlehem say Israeli authorities are demolishing their homes and settlers have destroyed their livelihoods in an effort to force the community to relocate.

After this incident, according to two Times officials, the Commentary section editors personally alerted the paper’s president, Tom McDevitt, to the problem. They also confronted de Borchgrave. (De Borchgrave denies his editors ever broached the subject; McDevitt did not respond to calls seeking comment.) Nevertheless, de Borchgrave only grew more brazen. On Jan. 3 of this year, he penned a column on the social media craze. The last two-thirds were made up largely of dubiously attributed quotes and text that had been lifted without attribution. One paragraph was nearly identical to text that had appeared on the website Clickz.com the previous month. Below are the two passages:

Facebook is the global 900-pound gorilla of social media networks. It reaches 55 percent of the world’s global audience, accounting for roughly 75 percent of time spent on social networking sites. That’s one in every seven minutes spent online all over the world (comScore’s 10/11 data indicate).

***

Facebook remains the global 900-pound gorilla of social media networks. Facebook reached 55 percent of the world’s global audience accounting for roughly 75 percent of time spent on social networking sites and one in every seven minutes spent online globally according to comScore’s October 2011 data.

There was also a list of “Top 5 social media tools of 2011,” which was taken almost wholesale from a P.R. company’s website.  Here’s the company’s list:

5. MyNewsDesk.com - This ‘news exchange’ startup out of Stockholm has become one of the most talked about social media tools of 2011 thanks to its robust analytics system and easy-to-use interface. Try it now if you haven’t already.

4. Wanderfly.com - This is a personalised recommendations engine that helps you discover new and exciting experiences based on your budget and interests. And, it integrates with Facebook to bring all of your social preferences together. This is a great example of niche recommendations portal and what Google+ is aiming to achieve on a wider scale.

3. YouTube.com/create - YouTube has been ramping up is creation tools in 2011 and the animation tools located at YouTube.com/create are a great example. GoAnimate is a great example allowing you to make animated videos in less than 10 minutes!

2. AppMakr.com - Talk about doing what it says on the tin! AppMakr helps you make free apps for the iPhone. Seriously cool.

1. BufferApp.com - It is now time to crown our most useful tool of 2011. BufferApp works by scheduling content you find online and adding into your Twitter or Facebook stream. It then publishes the tweets at regular intervals without flooding your followers. Pure genius.

Here’s de Borchgrave’s:

5. MyNewsDesk.com – a “news exchange” startup from Stockholm, Sweden, that advertises, “already one of the most talked about social media tools thanks to its robust analytics system and easy-to-use interface.”

4, Wanderfly.com – “a personalized recommendations engine that helps you discover new and exciting experiences based on your budget and interests. Integrates with Facebook to bring all your social preferences together. Niche recommendations portal is what Google+ is aiming to achieve on a wider scale.”

3. YouTube.com/create – “YouTube has been ramping up its creative tools and the animation tools located at YouTube.com/create are but one example. GoAnimate allows you to make animated videos in less than 10 minutes.”

2. App.Makr.com – “helps you make free apps for the iPhone. Seriously cool.”

1. BufferApp.com – self-described as “the most useful tool of 2011, schedules content found on line and adding into your Twitter or Facebook stream. It then publishes the Tweets at regular intervals without flooding your followers. Pure genius!”

While some of the text is in quotes, the only attribution is a vague “as described online.” Another passage, about tech writer Jason Hiner, lifted verbiage from Hiner’s blog, without attribution. Compare this:

In 2011 I went to a strictly vegan diet, dropped 25 pounds, and was surprised to learn how good normal could feel.

To this:

In 2011, he went on a strictly vegan diet, dropped 25 pounds and was surprised to learn how good normal could feel.

The Commentary section editors killed the piece, though it ran on United Press International, or UPI, an affiliated wire service. Shortly thereafter, de Borchgrave’s column disappeared from the section all together. Times officials with knowledge of the situation say it was banished by the section’s editors. “One mistake, and you might be able to say, ‘OK, this person had a bad day,’” says a Times staffer with knowledge of the matter. “But the plagiarism in this column was so egregious — frankly, it was breathtaking. It just couldn’t continue.” De Borchgrave maintains, on the other hand, that the gap emerged because he was on book leave, though his weekly columns continued to crop up on UPI — a fact that casts doubt on these claims. He also argues that any overlap between his work and other people’s is modest, and that likening it to plagiarism is “preposterous.” “I’ve been writing for 62 years,” he told Salon. “I’ve won a number of international journalism awards. I don’t think it makes much sense to be challenging me after all these years of reporting and writing.”

As it turns out, de Borchgrave’s hiatus from the Times was short-lived. In late March, his column resurfaced in the paper’s A section, which is normally reserved for news. “The decision-makers basically said, ‘We have a plagiarist here. Are we going to do anything about it? Fuck no!’” recalls one official. “We’ll just move him to another section where the editors won’t make such a fuss.’”

Less than a month later, de Borchgrave was yet again found to be cribbing without attribution. According to four Times officials, Brett Decker, the Commentary editor, wrote a sharply worded email to the executive team, including McDevitt and Ed Kelley, the paper’s top editor. It stressed the gravity of the problem and warned that, by keeping de Borchgrave on, management was jeopardizing the reputation of the paper and its journalists. (Kelley did not return calls seeking comment.) Still, nothing changed. De Borchgrave has held onto his job and continued cribbing copy — just last week he penned the piece with language lifted from the Christian Science Monitor. It was that column and another that caught the Post’s attention, but even the embarrassing media coverage hasn’t had much impact. A few hours after the Post piece ran, the Times published yet another de Borchgrave column.

For the past year, Drudge has provided the Washington Times with, on average, 46 percent of its monthly traffic. In November of 2011, the Drudge Report sent 4.7 million visitors to the Washington Times website, or 57 percent of all the Times’ traffic that month. By comparison, just 820,000 visitors actually accessed the Times through its homepage that November. (These numbers come from the Times’ internal Google Analytics statistics, which Salon obtained.)

The Drudge Report’s interest in the Washington Times is relatively recent. In November 2010, for example, it sent just 1.5 million readers to the paper’s website, less than a third of the readers it sent one year later. The Drudge Report began linking to the Washington Times with greater frequency in March 2011 — the same month, it so happens, that the Times hired a Drudge Report editor to write a weekly column for the paper.

Joseph Curl, a veteran political journalist and longtime friend of Drudge who had worked for the Drudge Report as an editor since May 2010, joined the Times that month. Curl’s first column coincided with a 30-person hiring spree. And in May 2011 — the last time Drudge referrals to the Times dipped below two million — it became clear that Drudge was employing another Washington Times hire from March 2011, Charlie Hurt, who had quietly left his job as the New York Post’s Washington bureau chief several months earlier. Hurt’s first Times op-ed ran the same week as Curl’s.

Both Curl and Hurt still work for Drudge, though you wouldn’t know it from their Washington Times columnist bios, which do not mention their other work. The jump in Drudge Report links to the Washington Times coincides perfectly with their hires. From April 1, 2011, through March 31, 2012, Drudge referred 39.4 million readers to the Washington Times’ website. In that same period, one year earlier, he referred less than half as many readers, just 19.6 million.

Are Hurt and Curl channeling traffic from one employer to another? And could the Times have hired Hurt and Curl with the expectation that the site would benefit from their jobs at Drudge? Hurt, Curl and Drudge, along with the Washington Times president, Tom McDevitt, all declined to comment. However, as editors at the Drudge Report, a famously small and close-knit shop, it seems unlikely that they are unaware of — or unconnected to — the sudden boom in Washington Times links. Both men have also personally benefited from their dual employment, as the Drudge Report has given their Washington Times’ columns coveted spots on the website’s blogroll. (Such a black box is the Drudge Report editorial apparatus that Curl and Hurt declined to comment on what their specific roles are at Drudge or whether, in fact, they even worked there still. A Washington Times insider says that both, however, continue to work for Drudge.)

Drudge is famous, of course, for his power in conservative circles. He is credited with helping put Mitt Romney over the top in the Republican primary, even coming under attack from Rick Santorum. Like Romney, the Washington Times can also credit much of a recent turnaround to Drudge. While the paper survives, as always, on the largesse of the Moon family, Drudge has helped the paper’s website restore traffic to the levels it enjoyed in the mid-2000s, before the economy and Moon family squabbles gutted the paper and its website. The man who became famous for nearly toppling a president now appears to be using his influence to prop up a right-wing paper.

Rice, the national security advisor in George W. Bush’s first presidential term and secretary of state in his second, is currently a professor at Stanford with the requisite right-wing think tank fellowship. She has not said or done anything “political” in years. But Curl has been hearing things!

America’s first black female secretary of state is quietly positioning herself to be the top choice of the eventual Republican presidential nominee, ready to deliver bona fide foreign-policy credentials lacking among the candidates. The 56-year-old has recently raised her profile, releasing her memoir in November and embarking on a monthlong book tour.

After 2 1/2 years as a professor at Stanford, Miss Rice is reportedly getting “antsy” to get back into the political game. “She’s ready to go,” said one top source.

Oh, a month-long tour in support of her book about her time in the Bush administration! She must be running for vice president, along with Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and Scott McClellan and George W. Bush.

There’s more. (And not just the part where Curl calls Rice “a spicy Rice dish” and waxes fetishistic about “her guns” being “a match for those of our first lady Michelle Obama.”)

Plus, her selection would be a giant chess move to counter the expected replacement of Vice President Joseph R. Biden with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Sure, the White House denies and denies, but that should really make any political watcher more suspicious. One White House insider even told me that the position swap was the only reason Mrs. Clinton joined the administration in the first place.

Curl has so many inside scoops packed into this column! I had no idea that our first presidential running mate swap since Ford’s 1976 campaign was basically a foregone conclusion and not just a weird Beltway journalist fantasy! But yes, I can see why the still  un-chosen GOP candidate would definitely be looking pretty closely at Rice — who’s been strongly making the case for her selection by not explicitly denying interest in the position — in case Obama replaces Biden with Clinton, which he will surely do.

The column gets worse (“Funny thing is, she is, unlike Barack Obama, an ‘American black’”) but that’s not really important. What’s important is exploring how someone like Condoleezza Rice ends up a perennial name on the fantasy ticket list.

Rice has been a subject of these columns since 2005, when she became Bush’s second secretary of state, and the White House tasked communications operative Jim Wilkinson — previously known best for inventing the false story of Jessica Lynch* — with getting Rice (and her boss) some much-needed positive press. Wilkinson did his job beautifully (remember when Rice’s knee-high boots were a topic of actual serious news coverage for weeks?) and Rice began receiving the “rock star” treatment.

In the Washington Post, Glenn Kessler, author of the 2007 Rice bio “The Confidante,” summarized the exact moment of the birth of the presidential speculation:

In March 2005, before Rice sat for an interview with the Washington Times, Wilkinson slipped a note to the editorial page editor, Tony Blankley, suggesting that she be asked whether she would consider running for president. It was an audacious proposal — she had been secretary for only six weeks — but such speculation would bolster Rice’s image as a leader. (Wilkinson and Blankley said they do not recall the incident, but others present said they saw Wilkinson’s note.)

Oh, the Washington Times.

Shortly thereafter, Dick Morris wrote a book claiming — nay, insisting — that 2008 would be “Condi vs. Hillary.”

As Iraq descended into a violent civil war in 2006, Rice-for-president buzz bizarrely grew. There was enough of a false grass-roots movement for a paint-by-numbers AP trend piece with a silly nickname and everything. Tim Russert asked her point blank. As always, she said no in no uncertain terms.

Then, of course, everyone began to speculate that she’d be McCain’s running mate. Robert Novak claimed as much on Fox. Dan Senor said she was pushing for the pick on some Sunday show. Hendrik Hertzberg wrote a Talk of the Town piece on the subject! McCain and Rice both finally denied “reports” that she was angling for the spot on the ticket.

Now, I guess, it’s time to start up the rumor mill anew.

But before you put pen to paper on that column about how a Gingrich-Rice ticket would surely win moderate women in Ohio, consider this: In addition to the fact that she’s always denied wanting the job, and in addition to the fact that she was an unmitigated failure in the Bush administration, downplaying terrorism as a priority prior to 9/11 and selling the public on the Iraq invasion with untruths, Condi Rice is pro-choice.

*Update: Jon Krakauer recently rescinded his claim that Wilkinson, then a communications aide to General Tommy Franks, was responsible for the initial false Washington Post report on Lynch’s apparent heroics before her capture. Though Wilkinson was obviously involved in the PR campaign surrounding Lynch’s rescue and return to the U.S., he apparently isn’t responsible for falsifying her actions or leaking that false story to the press.

The problem? Beyond the fact that “Article II Natural Born Citizen” appears to be a term made up out of thin air, those responsible for the ad don’t have a leg to stand on, legally. First off, they can get as many plaintiffs as they want; they still won’t be able to show standing — a particularized injury, basically — and that means the suit will get tossed, and fast. Second, the Birthers have just decided that their interpretation of what the Founding Fathers meant when they said in the Constitution the president had to be a natural born citizen is the correct one, courts be damned. And they’re wrong.

I’ve gone into this before, so to make a long story short: The Birthers believe that, in order to be a “natural born citizen,” you have to be born in the U.S. to two citizen parents. Obama’s father was a British citizen. As a result, Obama was a dual citizen at birth, and that, according to the Birthers, makes him ineligible for the presidency. They have seized upon “The Law of Nations,” a text by Swiss philosopher Emerich de Vattel that appears to agree with their interpretation, and decided that its word is law. There are some issues with that — first of all, they’re relying on a translation produced after the Constitution was written. Before that, de Vattel’s work didn’t support the Birthers — it didn’t even contain the term “natural born citizen.”

Beyond that, books by Swiss philosophers aren’t binding upon U.S. courts. British common law, however, is an important source of American law, and it indicates that if your parents are residing in the U.S., just being born here to is enough to make you a natural born citizen. That, at least, is the view the Supreme Court took in the 1898 case of U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark. Because the case wasn’t really about that issue, and the discussion of natural born citizenship was a digression, today’s courts wouldn’t be bound by that opinion — but they’d certainly give it quite a bit of weight, more than any ad in the Times would get.

(Hat-tip for the ad to Think Progress.)