I guess Rand Paul never learns his lessons. After filing his lawsuit today against President Obama over NSA data collection, Dana Milbank took a careful look at the language in the final product.

The original lawsuit was being drafted by Bruce Fein, a Washington, DC lawyer. Rand Paul had been working with him on it. When the actual lawsuit was filed, Milbank reports that Fein was removed and Ken Cuccinelli substituted in his place. Worse yet, the language in the complaint was lifted from Fein's work, for which he has not been paid in full.

But a Jan. 15 draft of the complaint written by Fein has long passages that are nearly identical to those in the complaint Cuccinelli filed Wednesday. Except for some cuts and minor wording changes, they are clearly the same documents. For example, Fein’s version said, “When the MATP was disclosed by Edward Snowden, public opinion polls showed widespread opposition to the dragnet collection, storage, retention, and search of telephony metadata collected on every domestic or international phone call made or received by citizens or permanent resident aliens in the United States.” Cuccinelli’s version said, “Since the MATP was publicly disclosed, public opinion polls showed widespread opposition to the dragnet collection, storage, retention, and search of telephone metadata collected on every domestic or international phone call made or received by citizens or permanent resident aliens in the United States.”

So in addition to filing a lawsuit clearly intended to grandstand and maybe raise money for FreedomWorks, they lifted another lawyer's work and dropped it in the complaint they ultimately filed.

Way to go, guys.