Montana Democrats pick state lawmaker as U.S. Senate candidate

[August 18, 2014]  (Reuters) - Democrats in Montana on Saturday nominated a one-term state representative, Amanda Curtis, as their candidate for U.S. Senate to replace incumbent Senator John Walsh who quit the race following a controversy over his suspected plagiarism.

Delegates at a special convention chose Curtis, 34, a teacher in Butte, over rancher Dirk Adams, according to a Twitter posting by the Montana Democratic Party . The state party did not respond to an email and phone call about the nomination.

Curtis will face U.S. Representative Steve Daines, a Republican, and Libertarian Roger Roots in the mid-term election this November.

Walsh had been appointed to the post by Montana Governor Steve Bullock earlier this year to replace outgoing Senator Max Baucus, now ambassador to China. But last month, the U.S. Army War College opened an inquiry into accusations that Walsh plagiarized parts of a paper he wrote for a master's degree.

The investigation followed a New York Times report that compared the paper to work by other authors, and found similarities to a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace document and a 1998 essay by a scholar at Harvard.

(Reporting by Kevin Murphy in Kansas City; Editing by Alex Dobuzinskis and Marguerita Choy)

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