Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul said a recent report claiming fellow candidate Ben Carson fabricated a story about being offered a scholarship to West Point was a “misunderstanding”. Asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press” whether he is being scrutinized more than President Barack Obama and former President Bill Clinton, Carson replied: “Not like this”.
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The older Mr. Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, has surged in the polls nationally and in Iowa, whose caucuses kick off next year’s primary season.
Carson told ABC’s This Week television news show on Sunday that the West Point website uses the word “scholarship”, so that he was not wrong to use this word in the past when describing overtures from military officials who told him when he was young that they could get him a “full scholarship” to the academy.
Carson also explained that he never said he received a full scholarship to West Point.
“I think everyone is a threat to me”, Trump said.
“Maybe they’re not spending all of their time reading The Wall Street Journal”, he said.
But Trump also implied that Carson’s story about attempting to stab someone in his youth – only to have his knife broken when he hit a large belt buckle – was hard to believe.
As for those white students he says he protected during riots after the death of Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. Carson said that just because no one has come forward to confirm his story does not mean that they will not eventually.
He said he was photographed by the Yale Daily News at the time, but the Wall Street Journal challenged this on Friday, saying no photo identifying Carson as a student ran in the student newspaper.
Last month, police in Baltimore said they didn’t have enough information to verify Carson’s account of being held at gunpoint at a fast-food restaurant there more than 30 years ago.
I won’t be surprised if we learn that a few of the stories in Carson’s autobiography are indeed exaggerated or false. “He wrote it, I didn’t write it”, Trump told NBC. “Well, you notice, I said it was offered”, Carson told host John Dickerson.
In the third GOP debate, Carson said it was “absolutely absurd” to say he had a formal relationship with the company Mannatech.
In four of his Sunday interviews, Trump said Carson probably couldn’t be cured of that “pathological disease”. “And I think the reason that so many people are turned off to the political process has a lot to do with the fact that we’re not talking about the real issues impacting real people”. Upon reflection, it now seems clear to me that the difference between Carson’s original version of the story and the version that later emerged isn’t large enough to level an accusation of lying.
Do you support Dr. Ben Carson?
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“Please show me that person”. “I hope it works out well for Ben, I am not looking to see anything bad happen to him”.
