CLEVELAND – A staff writer for the Trump Organization took
responsibility on Wednesday for the “chaos” caused by a speech given
by the wife of U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump that drew
accusations of plagiarism and cast a shadow over the party’s convention this
week.

The writer, Meredith McIver, apologized and offered an explanation
that threw into sharp relief two days of efforts by the Trump campaign to deny
there had been a problem with Melania Trump’s speech on Monday night.

The Republican convention in Cleveland, which formally anointed
Trump on Tuesday as the party nominee for the Nov. 8 presidential election, was
meant to be an occasion for the party to rally around its unorthodox White
House candidate after a bitterly divisive primary campaign.

But the accusations of plagiarism, and the Trump campaign’s
responses to them, have been a major talking point just as the party tries to
showcase a candidate who it believes can appeal to voters and a campaign
operation capable of beating Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in the Nov. 8
election.

In a statement, McIver said she had inserted passages into the
Melania Trump speech that resembled parts of a 2008 speech by first lady
Michelle Obama to the 2008 Democratic National Convention, when Barack Obama
was in his first campaign for the presidency.

McIver said she had offered to resign over the speech
controversy, but Trump and his family had rejected the offer. The Trump
Organization is owned by Donald Trump.

Trump defended McIver in an ABC News interview on Wednesday,
saying: “She made a mistake. People make mistakes. You’ve made mistakes.
We all make mistakes.”

He said McIver had been with him for a long time and was a
“good person.” Trump added: “I thought it was terrific the way
she came forward and just said, ‘Look, it was a mistake that I made.’ She
thought it was very unfair to Melania.”

In her speech on Monday, Melania Trump spoke of passing on to
the next generation the value of hard work that she inherited from her parents
and said that “the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your
dreams and your willingness to work for them.”

“My parents impressed on me the values that you work hard
for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say
and keep your promise; that you treat people with respect,” Melania Trump
told the Cleveland convention.

In Denver eight years ago, Michelle Obama said she and her
husband, Barack, “were raised with so many of the same values: that you
work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do
what you say you’re going to do; that you treat people with dignity and
respect.”

McIver said Melania Trump had read passages from Michelle
Obama’s speech over the phone to her as examples. McIver then wrote them down
and later included some of the phrasing in a draft that became Melania Trump’s
speech.

McIver said in her statement that Michelle Obama is a person
Melania Trump “has always liked.”

 “I did not check Mrs.
Obama’s speeches. This was my mistake and I feel terrible for the chaos I have
caused Melania and the Trumps, as well as to Mrs. Obama. No harm was meant,”
McIver said.

Nowhere in the statement by McIver and comments by Trump
campaign officials on the speech has there been any sense of irony that the
wife of the Republican nominee was inspired by the words of Michelle Obama at
the same time that speaker after speaker at the Republican convention, echoing
Trump, assailed her husband’s policies.