Montana senator backtracks on ‘mistake’

Sen. John Walsh (D-Mont.) is backtracking on recent comments that post-traumatic stress disorder may have contributed to his plagiarism in a 2007 master’s thesis.

{mosads}”I am in no way, no way, tying what I did to any type of PTSD,” Walsh said Friday in a KMMS radio interview in Bozeman. “That had nothing to do with the mistake that I made. … I may have said that, if that was the thought of that, that’s not at all in any way what I meant or said.”

That’s a departure from what Walsh said on Wednesday, shortly after the New York Times reported that he’d plagiarized large portions of his final paper to graduate from the prestigious Army War College.

“I don’t want to blame my mistake on PTSD, but I do want to say it may have been a factor,” Walsh told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “My head was not in a place very conducive to a classroom and an academic environment.”

Walsh’s plagiarism scandal, and his ensuing struggles to explain it, have likely doomed what was already an uphill campaign against Rep. Steve Daines (R-Mont.).