Rolland “Rolly” Fischer, the former head of the Colorado River Water Conservation District now at the heart of the Scott McInnis plagiarism scandal, told Denver’s Channel 7 Wednesday that McInnis is lying.
McInnis, a Republican gubernatorial candidate and former U.S. congressman, in a Denver Post story on Monday blamed Fischer for lifting sections of a paper on water issues by current Colorado Supreme Court Justice Gregory Hobbs and passing them on to McInnis as original research.
McInnis then put his name on the work as part of a series of articles for the Hasan Family Foundation, but he said he did not know that the work was not Fischer’s original research.
Fischer told Channel 7 he never knew about McInnis’s fellowship for the foundation or the fact he was being paid $300,000 by them for articles on water issues in 2005 and 2006. Fischer said he was paid a few hundred dollars for each article he researched and believed it was for McInnis’s own education on water issues.
McInnis left congress in 2004 and faces a tough primary against Evergreen businessman Dan Maes next month, with the winner taking on Democratic Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper in the race for the governor’s mansion.
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