On the nonprofit group's site, the two posts are accompanied by the name of the Partnership for Public Service staffer who wrote them. | AP Photo Trump transition website lifts passages from nonpartisan nonprofit

President-elect Donald Trump's official government website, GreatAgain.gov, lifts the work of a nonprofit organization that provides research on presidential transitions, with some passages being duplicated whole-cloth.

The copying, pointed out to POLITICO on Friday, comes four months after incoming first lady Melania Trump gave a speech to the Republican National Convention that borrowed multiple lines from Michelle Obama.


The Trump website was launched late Wednesday and replicates material on the copyrighted site of the Center for Presidential Transition, which is a project of the Washington-based nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service.

Trump's site contains a small note at the bottom: "First Posted on Center for Presidential Transition." But by not making clear where the content comes from, including a link back to the source site, the Trump transition faces charges of sloppiness at best, and even potential legal challenges; BuzzFeed is among the online publishers who have faced copyright lawsuits for cribbing without giving prominent credit.

Much of the transition site's news feed matches information from the nonprofit's site word-for-word and was clearly written before Election Day. One page has a header dated last Sunday and contains a misplaced pronoun that is supposed to refer to the partnership rather than the Trump transition.

One post, titled "Help Wanted: 4,000 Presidential Appointments," refers to a "chart below" — but the version on Trump's site has no chart. On the center's website, those lines are followed by a detailed interactive graphic showing the positions requiring Senate confirmation in the departments of Justice and State.

Another page on Trump's site, titled "The Offices and Agencies Supporting the Transition," is exactly the same as a page on the nonprofit's site — including a reference to "our own Center library." Both versions link to the nonprofit's online resource.

On the nonprofit group's site, the two posts are accompanied by the name of the Partnership for Public Service staffer who wrote them. There is no such attribution on the Trump site.

Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, which has been working with all the major presidential campaigns on transition matters since early in the year, declined to criticize the cross-posting.

"Our hope in researching, compiling and posting this information on our platform is so that it is a resource that is used for the betterment of transitions going forward," he said via a spokesperson.

A spokesperson for the Trump transition didn't immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

The center's site is a repository of information about presidential transitions for both the incoming administration and public. This is the first election for the center to have this role as a conduit of transition information and best practices.

Even if the transition used the passages without permission from the nonprofit, it's still in a gray area of copyright law, said a law professor who has studied copyright issues involving Google Books.

"Copyright gives authors exclusive rights to the things they write. I can't go out and publish a copy of 'Harry Potter' without J.K. Rowling's permission, " says James Grimmelmann, a law professor at Cornell University. But Grimmelmann said the context in which the copied content is used affects whether it can be considered as fair use under the law. "When someone is using something in service to the nation, we give them a bit more leeway."