Donald Trump Jr. is laying the blame for Melania Trump's convention address on her team of speechwriters, addressing the accusations of plagiarism in an interview with CBS News' Norah O'Donnell. 
 
 "I imagine there's people who shouldn't have done that or who should have cleaned it up better," Trump said in the interview, scheduled to air Tuesday night. 
 
 Trump, executive vice president of the Trump Organization and trusted campaign adviser to his father, said that he believed the possible first lady "did excellently." 
 
 "I'm proud of the way she did," he said. 
 
 When asked if Paul Manafort, the campaign's chairman and Trump's convention manager, should have done a better job overseeing the speech, Trump Jr. defended Manafort. 
 
 "Paul didn't really have anything do with the speech," he said, acknowledging that Melania Trump "of course" worked with speechwriters. 
 
 "Having never done this before you have to work with speechwriters," he said. "Those are the people that did this, not Paul." 
 
 Donald Trump's comments come just hours after Manafort told "CBS This Morning" that Mrs. Trump "never cribbed from another speech." 
 
 "They're a couple of phrases," Manafort said of her address, which shared several similarities with Michelle Obama's 2008 Democratic convention speech. "It's basically three places in the speech and its fragments of words." 
 
 At the Republican convention, Melania Trump said this: 
 
 "My parents impressed on me the value of 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. Show the values and morals in in the daily life." 
 
 Michelle Obama said this in her Democratic convention speech in 2008: 
 
 "And Barack and I 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, even if you don't know them, and even if you don't agree with them. 
 
 And there was this similarity, too -- here's Melania Trump: 
 
 "We need to pass those lessons on to the many generations to follow. [Cheering] Because we want our children in these nations to know that the only limit to your achievement is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them." 
 
 And Michelle Obama: 
 
 "And Barack and I set out to build lives guided by these values, and pass them on to the next generation. Because we want our children -- and all children in this nation -- to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work for them." 
 
 Trump is scheduled to speak at the Republican National Convention Tuesday night, addressing the evening's theme of "Make America Work Again." 
 
 Watch the interview with Donald Trump Jr. Tuesday night on CBS News. Stay tuned for more of the interview on "CBS This Morning" Wednesday. ||||| The ridicule from both Democrats and Republicans was instant and relentless, disrupting what was meant to be a high point of the convention. 
 
 It was, by all accounts, an entirely preventable blunder, committed in front of an audience of 23 million television viewers, that exposed the weaknesses of an organization that has long spurned the safeguards of a modern presidential campaign, such as the free software that detects plagiarism. 
 
 “It just shouldn’t have happened,” said Matt Latimer, a White House speechwriter for President George W. Bush. “This was an easy home run speech: a successful, attractive immigrant talking about her husband.” 
 
 Nobody seemed more startled than Mr. and Ms. Trump, who arrived in New York on Tuesday morning after a flight from Cleveland to find themselves at the center of a bizarre uproar over authenticity, plagiarism and a knotty question: Why did the wife of the Republican nominee borrow passages from the wife of the current Democratic president? 
 
 Ms. Trump spent most of Tuesday out of sight, while her husband vented his frustration and anger throughout the day. 
 
 This account of how a speech written by professionals was transformed into the problematic version delivered on Monday night at the Quicken Loans Arena is based on interviews with more than a dozen people involved in and close to the Trump campaign. Many of them spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose details that were supposed to remain confidential. 
 
 It reinforces dominant themes of Mr. Trump’s campaign that still linger from the primary, which his team has struggled to change: a deliberately bare-bones campaign structure, a slapdash style and a reliance on the instincts of the candidate over the judgments of experienced political experts, like Mr. Scully and Mr. McConnell. 
 
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 The two original speechwriters were not aware of how significantly the speech had been changed until they saw Ms. Trump deliver it on television Monday night, along with the rest of the country. 
 
 In the prime-time address, Ms. Trump unfurled a sequence of life lessons — about how “your word is your bond,” about “your dreams and your willingness to work for them,” and the “integrity, passion and intelligence” of her parents — in the same sequence and using much of the same language that Mrs. Obama employed in 2008. 
 
 Just like Mrs. Obama, Ms. Trump explained how she wanted to pass those lessons on to her children and the children of the world. And just like Mrs. Obama, she offered a gauzy invocation about the limitlessness of aspirations when they are matched by determination. 
 
 In a series of evolving explanations, Trump aides and allies dismissed the episode as a trivial distraction, alternating between outright denial that Ms. Trump’s speech had used word-for-word phrases from Mrs. Obama and blaming the news media. 
 
 “Ninety-three percent of the speech is completely different,” declared Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey. Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman, pegged the number of suspicious words at 50. “And that includes ‘ands’ and ‘thes’ and things like that,” he said on Tuesday. 
 
 Across the country, slack-jawed Republican political operatives and speechwriters expressed expletive-laden bewilderment at the organizational breakdown allowing such an episode to occur. 
 
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 “It’s like some guy trying to paddle across a river in a rowboat who shoots a hole in his boat,” said Stuart Stevens, who wrote speeches for Mitt Romney and his wife, Ann, throughout the 2012 campaign. 
 
 In interviews, alarmed Republican speechwriters outlined the layers of formal scrutiny, apparently disregarded by the Trump campaign, traditionally applied to almost every draft of a major convention address. They described word-by-word fact-checking by a dedicated team of experts and computer software designed to catch plagiarism. Several online programs, like DupliChecker, are available at no cost. 
 
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 “It’s pretty standard,” Mr. Stevens said of the software, which detects overlap in word choice and sentence structure. “We used it.” 
 
 An urgent priority: avoiding the slightest hint of oratorical theft. 
 
 “The most cardinal rule of any speech-writing operation is that you cannot plagiarize,” said Mr. Latimer, the Bush speechwriter, who is now a partner at Javelin, a communications firm. If you do, he said, “you lose your job.” 
 
 That is unlikely to happen in the Trump campaign, which revolves around a freewheeling candidate with a fierce resistance to admitting error. 
 
 It was Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and top adviser, who commissioned the speech from Mr. Scully and Mr. McConnell — and praised their draft. But Ms. Trump decided to revise it, and at one point she turned to a trusted hand: Meredith McIver, a New York City-based former ballet dancer and English major who has worked on some of Mr. Trump’s books, including “Think Like a Billionaire.” It was not clear how much of a hand Ms. McIver had in the final product, and she did not respond to an email on Tuesday. 
 
 (On Wednesday, Ms. McIver released a statement taking blame for the lifted passages and calling them an innocent mistake in the early stages of drafting the speech. She said she had offered her resignation, but that Mr. Trump and his family had refused to accept it.) 
 
 Research for the speech, it seems, drew Mr. Scully and Mr. McConnell to the previous convention speeches delivered by candidates’ spouses. 
 
 The Trump campaign declined to say who or how many senior campaign officials read or reviewed the speech. But when Ms. Trump and her staff had finished revising the speech, virtually all that remained from the original was an introduction and a passage that included the phrase “a national campaign like no other.” 
 
 The controversy set off by the stumble spread rapidly from the political class to average Americans: African-Americans were angry that Ms. Trump had chosen to swipe the words of the country’s first African-American first lady, especially given Mr. Trump’s hostility to President Obama. Scores of Twitter users, deploying the hashtag #famousMelaniaTrumpQuotes, began to re-attribute famous lines, like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream,” to Ms. Trump. 
 
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 But the mischievous teasing at times turned serious, as blacks invoked a painful history of prominent white figures stealing the work of black artists and presenting it as their own. “I’m not surprised Melanie plagiarized from Michelle,” wrote Yasmin Yonis. “White women have spent centuries stealing black women’s genius, labor, babies, bodies.” 
 
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 To many Republicans, the lapse seemed frustratingly inevitable from a candidate who has not just eschewed the backstops of a major political campaign — he has mocked them as a waste of money. His campaign slogans, “America First” and “Make America Great Again,” echoed Pat Buchanan and Ronald Reagan. His social media graphics were crowdsourced on Twitter and Reddit by an aide who formerly managed Mr. Trump’s golf club in Westchester. 
 
 The mistakes have piled up. Last summer, Mr. Trump posted on Twitter his portrait superimposed over a picture of the White House and what turned out to be a stock image of Waffen-SS troops from World War II. 
 
 But this one stung, in part because everybody was watching. 
 
 Jon Favreau, a former chief speechwriter to President Obama, was home on his couch half-following Ms. Trump’s speech on TV while catching up on work Monday night. At first, he was skeptical of the criticism. 
 
 “Everyone says, ‘You work hard,’” Mr. Favreau said, reciting a line from the speech. “Political speeches are filled with clichés that are impossible to avoid.” But when he got to Ms. Trump saying, “Your word is your bond,” Mr. Favreau recalled, he stopped short. 
 
 “I remember Michelle saying, ‘Your word is your bond,’ and thinking I’ve never heard of someone saying that in politics,” Mr. Favreau said. “That was when I knew it might have been copied.” ||||| Six weeks ago, two of the most respected speechwriters in Republican politics were asked to write a convention address for Melania Trump ahead of her big moment in the spotlight in Cleveland. 
 
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 The speech she gave Monday night -- which included passages bearing striking resemblance to Michelle Obama's 2008 convention address and raised questions of plagiarism -- was not it. 
 
 An early version of the speech crafted by GOP speechwriters Matthew Scully and John McConnell was apparently disregarded and shelved by the Trump campaign. 
 
 Scully and McConnell have previously helped craft some of the most consequential political speeches in the modern era, including those delivered by former President George W. Bush in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. 
 
 Six weeks ago, they were approached by Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son-in-law and campaign adviser, to write a convention speech for Melania Trump. The Slovenian-born former model has prominently appeared at her husband's side throughout the 2016 campaign, but has spoken infrequently on the trail. 
 
 The pair wrote a speech and submitted a draft to Trump's campaign over a month ago. 
 
 According to a knowledgeable source, Kushner indicated his approval of the speech draft shortly after it was submitted, but the speechwriters never heard from him again about it. 
 
 The speech delivered by Melania Trump last night included almost nothing of the draft written by Scully and McConnell. 
 
 In an interview with NBC News aboard Trump's plane Monday evening ahead of her speech, Melania Trump said she wrote her speech with "as little help as possible." ||||| Play Facebook 
 
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 The original draft of Melania Trump’s Republican National Convention speech did not include the section that appears to have been lifted from Michelle Obama’s 2008 convention speech, according to documents obtained exclusively by NBC News. 
 
 The Trump campaign’s shifting story — with Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort initially saying it would be “crazy” for Melania to lift from Obama’s speech, but hours later Donald Trump Jr. blaming unnamed speechwriters and saying they "should’ve cleaned it up better" — kept the matter alive well into the second night of convention festivities. 
 
 But the documents, including the original draft and corroborating emails, obtained by NBC News, suggest the passage in question originated within the Trump campaign, and raises new questions for the GOP nominee’s top aides, who spent much of Tuesday deflecting blame and insisting there was nothing wrong with Melania Trump's speech. 
 
 Related: Ex-Obama Speechwriters React to Melania Trump's Speech 
 
 Melania Trump told NBC News Monday, just hours before delivering the speech, that she largely wrote it herself. 
 
 "I read it once over, and that's all because I wrote it with as little help as possible,'' she told TODAY's Matt Lauer. 
 
 The campaign repeatedly refused to identify who, if anyone, helped her craft the speech, though multiple sources told NBC News that Rick Gates, a top aide and ally of Manafort, signed off on the final text. Sources close to the Trump campaign tell NBC News that the Trump team hired Matthew Scully, a veteran speechwriter who drafted Sarah Palin’s 2008 convention speech, to write Melania Trump’s speech. The draft he submitted to the Trump campaign includes none of the portions in question. 
 
 Related: Melania Trump: Far From the First Political Plagiarism Scandal 
 
 A senior Trump aide tells NBC that Scully created an early draft, but that was rejected and the process started over, adding Scully’s initial draft didn’t make its way into the final version. 
 
 Portions of Scully’s work were, however, included in the text as delivered by Melania Trump on Monday. The first six paragraphs of the text as delivered were largely written by Scully, as well as a significant chunk of the conclusion, during which Melania touted the “talent…energy…tenacity” of her husband and the significance of the fall campaign. 
 
 Scully wrote in his draft: “There will be highs and lows and unexpected turns — it wouldn’t be a Trump enterprise without them.” 
 
 Play Facebook 
 
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 Melania delivered that line with minor tweaks: “There will be good times and hard times and unexpected turns — it would not be a Trump contest without excitement and drama.” 
 
 But Scully’s draft doesn’t include the sections in which Melania Trump talks about her interest in helping children and women if she becomes First Lady, or the values she and her husband will bring to the White House if he’s elected — or the shout-out to former Sen. Bob Dole, who notably employed Manafort and many of his top aides. 
 
 The speech — the most high-profile of the cycle for the notoriously press-shy Melania — did include the passages from the 2008 speech Michelle Obama gave at the convention where her husband was nominated by the Democratic party for president. Under a cloud of plagiarism, the scandal marred the first day of Trump’s convention, which aides had hoped would be a seamless display of GOP unity to help kick off the fall campaign. 
 
 Related: Who Should Be Held Accountable for Melania Trump's Speech 
 
 All day Tuesday, Trump campaign officials deflected questions over who, if anyone, would be fired for the issue with the speech. 
 
 Aides also downplayed the issue. Manafort told NBC News on Tuesday morning that Donald Trump was "very pleased with last night," and in a handful of media appearances Manafort downplayed the similarities between the two speeches and framed the controversy as overblown and driven by Democrats. 
 
 He insisted to CBS News there was "no cribbing" of Obama's speech and minimized the issue's relevance. 
 
 "Certainly there is no feeling on [Melania's] part that she did it," Manafort said. "What she did is use words that are common words." 
 
 He also said he didn’t believe "Donald Trump feels that there is anything to fire about." 
 
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 Republican National Committee Communications Director Sean Spicer ridiculed the suggestion that any of Melania’s speech could’ve been plagiarized, drawing similarities between her remarks and quotes from the children's TV show "My Little Pony." 
 
 "A simple Google search of three phrases comes up with everything from Sparkle Pony to John Legend to Akon," Spicer said on MSNBC. 
 
 But Donald Trump Jr. appeared to contradict Manafort in an interview on CBS News Tuesday night, acknowledging there were "people who… should’ve cleaned it up better," and pointing fingers at unnamed speechwriters. 
 
 "I imagine there's people who shouldn't have done that or who should have cleaned it up better," he said.
– With the Trump campaign still stinging from allegations that Melania Trump cribbed from a 2008 Michelle Obama speech, various news outlets are beginning to piece together how the gaffe happened. At this point, one thing is clear: You can't blame the original speechwriters. As ABC News reports, the Trump campaign hired two heavyweights, Matthew Scully and John McConnell, to craft the speech, and they turned in their draft more than a month ago. It didn't include any of the controversial passages that would come to embarrass the campaign—in fact, the delivered speech bears almost no resemblance to the original. So who changed it? That's still not fully clear, but the New York Times reports that Melania Trump herself was unhappy with the original and decided it needed to be overhauled. The Times says she turned to "trusted hand" Meredith McIver, who helped Donald Trump with books like Think Like a Billionaire, and it seems their research led them to previous speeches by first ladies. The Times adds that it's unclear how much of a role McIver had in writing the final speech, but when all was said and done, it reports only the introduction and a line about a "national campaign like no other" was left standing from the original. NBC News, meanwhile, reports by way of sources that Rick Gates, a top aide to campaign chairman Paul Manafort, approved the final text. Still, with all the plagiarism-detection software available, other speechwriters have expressed their bafflement about how such a rudimentary step was seemingly overlooked. Son Donald Trump Jr. told CBS News that "there's people who ... should've cleaned it up better."