Congressman Patrick Murphy on Thursday refused to address calls for his resignation and denied charges of academic fraud. Through a spokeswoman, the Republican-turned-Democrat said, “These attacks are simply false,” according to a report in the Miami Herald.

The Herald first broke the academic fraud story on May 23rd, uncovering evidence that Murphy claimed college degrees in both accounting and finance, falsehoods that first appeared during his 2012 campaign for Congress.

The Better Florida Alliance, a non-profit advocacy group for good government policy, released a statement earlier today calling for Murphy to resign.

“Most of us earned our high school diplomas, our trade certifications, our college degrees. Some even earn a living without any of those credentials, but they don’t have to lie about it, they just work hard to earn what they have,” a spokesman for the organization said. “He is setting a horrible example for the students in his district. Patrick Murphy should be ashamed of himself and should immediately resign in disgrace.”

Ignoring the charges of academic fraud, resume padding, and calls for his resignation, Murphy’s office instead attacked the Better Florida Alliance as a “secretive attack-dog group.”

Murphy’s false academic claims have appeared on more than one occasion, according to the Miami Herald, which found he first made the bogus claims during the 2012 campaign, and later the claims resurfaced on both his official Congressional website and his 2016 Senate campaign website, as well as from Murphy himself during a television interview.

He maintains that all incidents of academic fraud were “inadvertent.”

Should Patrick Murphy resign from Congress because of his academic fraud?

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