DENVER—The founder of an organization that paid a Colorado gubernatorial candidate $300,000 for water essays that were later determined to be plagiarized is rejecting suggestions they were trying to buy influence.
Dr. Malik Hasan, who helped establish the Hasan Family Foundation, says the board was hoping to get recommendations on how to deal with Colorado’s drought when it commissioned the essays from former U.S. Rep. Scott McInnis in 2005.
Hasan says he was disappointed when McInnis took a job in a law firm and turned in reports that were unpublishable, but there was nothing he could do about it.
McInnis later admitted that parts of the essays were written by a Colorado Supreme Court judge and he promised to pay the money back to the foundation.
