Donald Trump Staff Writer Takes Blame For Melania Trump Speech Plagiarism

A Trump Organization in-house staff writer has taken the fall for Melania Trump's convention speech and said she offered to resign over controversy but the Trump family did not accept.

Meredith McIver, a former ballet dancer who has written several books with Donald Trump, released a statement Wednesday taking blame for the blunder that has dominated the conversation surrounding the first two days of the GOP convention, where Donald Trump officially became the Republican nominee for president.

McIver said she worked closely on the speech with Melania Trump and that, "A person she has always liked is Michelle Obama."

Melania Trump read McIver some of her favorite Michelle Obama quotes over the phone, the statement said, and some of them were inserted into her final speech. But the convention speech was not checked against Michelle Obama's 2008 address to the Democratic convention.

(The Washington Post also reported that using corporate resources to write a campaign speech could be a violation of federal election law.)

Donald Trump staffers and people close to the GOP nominee have offered conflicting reports about how the plagiarism happened.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie defended the speech, saying, "Ninety-three percent of the speech is completely different."

And Donald Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson said that Melania Trump "really wanted to communicate to Americans in phrases they’ve heard before."

Campaign chairman Paul Manafort himself has offered different excuses for what happened. He at first outright denied that any copying had happened and blamed Hillary Clinton for drawing attention to it. (The plagiarism was first spotted by an out-of-work reporter who tweeted comparisons to both speeches.)

Then, he said only about 50 or so words were suspicious, according to the New York Times, "And that includes ‘ands’ and ‘thes’ and things like that,” Manafort said.

Finally, in a contentious interview on CNN just hours before the campaign released a statement saying something had gone wrong, Manafort continued to deny just that.

“I’m not lying about anything, Chris,” Manafort told CNN's Chris Cuomo, who was pushing Manafort to admit parts of the speech were copied. “As far as we’re concerned, there are similar words that were used, we’ve said that, but the feelings of those words and the commonality of those words do not create a situation which we feel we have to agree with you.”

Read McIver's full statement below: