Ben Carson slammed CNN’s reporting into his past as a “bunch of lies” in a combative interview on Friday while other media outlets focused on portions of his personal story.
“This is a bunch of lies, that is what it is,” Carson said on CNN’s “New Day” when Alisyn Camerota asked about the report by Scott Glover and Maeve Reston in which they spoke to people Carson grew up with. “This is a bunch of lies attempting to say I’m lying about my history. I think it’s pathetic, and basically what the media does is they try to get you distracted.”
On “New Day,” Camerota pushed back on Carson’s argument that the reporters on the CNN story did not talk to people who knew him earlier than high school, but Carson rejected that and launched into an aggressive attack on the media. He also accused the media of not doing the same with Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama.
“The vetting that you all did with President Obama doesn’t even come close, doesn’t even come close to what you guys are trying to do in my case, and you’re just going to keep going back, ‘He said this 12 years ago’ — it is just garbage,” Carson said. “Give me a break.”
The two journalists repeatedly approached the Carson campaign during their reporting and again before publication of the story. But the campaign staff declined to comment or to assist them in locating classmate or victims of violence who could provide insights about Carson’s past.
On “New Day,” Carson did not explain which aspects of the story he feels are incorrect.
Carson’s personal narrative — a centerpiece of his campaign and star power — has long revolved around his accounts of his violent past and descriptions of the healing powers of his faith.
Glover and Reston spoke with nine friends, classmates and neighbors who grew up with Carson, and none had any memory of the anger or violence the candidate has described.
CNN’s story pointed out that none of the people interviewed challenged the veracity of his accounts, but said they were surprised at them and did not reflect the youth that they knew.
On Friday afternoon, Politico published a story questioning Carson’s account of having been offered — and rejecting — a scholarship to the storied West Point military academy. Carson’s campaign told Politico that while Carson was a top ROTC student and met with Gen. William Westmoreland, he didn’t pursue admittance to West Point.
Carson spokesman Doug Watts said the Politico story, which claimed the campaign acknowledged the West Point background was “fabricated,” was an “outright lie.”
Armstrong Williams, Carson’s business manager, said the candidate “always been clear that he never applied, he gracefully let them know that medicine was his calling.”
“It’s clear that what the Politico writer, with what he was trying to gain with the headline, did not substantiate it with his article,” Williams told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.
West Point spokeswoman Theresa Brinkerhoff told CNN there would be no records about Carson’s interaction with the school unless he actually enrolled. Files on potential cadets from that time would have only been kept three years unless the person became a student, she said.
“No matter what at this point, because the records were so many years ago, we wouldn’t have anything on him,” she said.
While an official letter of admission would have come from the adjutant general of the Army, who was not Westmoreland, she said it was common for top military officials to recruit the best and brightest high school students. And she said she could imagine that the school’s lack of tuition — as a federally funded institution — could have been communicated or interpreted as a scholarship.
“I wouldn’t find that odd, that a general would pursue a discussion to kind of talk to him and say, ‘Do you know what West Point would offer you?’ And if you’re using general terminology to a 17-year-old, I could say how you would call them scholarships. We don’t use that terminology, (but) I could see how that could occur,” Brinkerhoff said.
In his autobiography, Carson did not explicitly say he applied to the school.
“Afterward, Sgt. Hunt introduced me to General Westmoreland, and I had dinner with him and the Congressional Medal winners. Later I was offered a full scholarship to West Point. I didn’t refuse the scholarship outright, but I let them know that a military career wasn’t where I saw myself going,” Carson wrote.