Writer of Donald Trump Jr. speech debunks suggestions of plagiarism for second-straight night

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Donald Trump Jr.

AP

Donald Trump Jr.

Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" briefly caused a stir Tuesday night when it suggested that for the second straight night, a member of the Trump family had lifted lines from a previous work for their addresses to the Republican National Convention.

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Part of Donald Trump Jr.'s speech at the convention, the show's staff noted in a tweet, resembled part of a piece in The American Conservative by F.H. Buckley.

But Buckley told Business Insider that he was, in fact, part of the speechwriting process.

"I was a speechwriter for this speech. So I'm afraid there's no issue here," he said in an email.

He added: "I was a speechwriter for the speech. So there's not a plagiarism issue."

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The passage in question served as one of the most memorable from Donald Jr.'s address Tuesday night.

"Our schools used to be an elevator to the middle class," he said in the address on the same night that his father, Donald, was officially named the Republican nominee for president. "Now they're stalled on the ground floor. They're like Soviet-era department stores that are run for the benefit of the clerks and not the customers."

The Trump campaign spent much of the day Tuesday attempting to control the damage from the revelation that Melania Trump, Donald's wife, lifted parts of her rousing Monday-night speech from First Lady Michelle Obama's 2008 Democratic National Convention address.

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