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Ben Carson quips: 'Thank you for not asking what I said in the 10th grade'
(AP Photo/Morry Gash)
Ben Carson.
Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, under increased scrutiny about various aspects of his personal background during Tuesday night's Republican presidential debate.
"First of all, thank you for not asking what I said in the 10th grade. I appreciate that. The fact of this matter is: We should vet all candidates. I have no problem with being vetted. What I do have a problem with is being lied about. And then putting that out there as truth," Carson said during the Fox Business debate.
Carson and his campaign have been firing back after a series of media investigations have questioned some of the four- and five-decade-old stories in his memoir, "Gifted Hands."
Politico pointed out that he never received a formal scholarship to West Point, as he had claimed. CNN could not find anyone who could corroborate his claims of being a violent young teenager. And The Wall Street Journal reported that a Yale class Carson said he took, Perceptions 301, doesn't exist.
Carson aggressively disputed each of the reports, which he called poorly-researched.
He said he interpreted an informal offer of a West Point appointment as a scholarship. He pointed to a 1997 article in which his mother discussed his violent childhood. And he said his co-author had simply gotten the course number wrong at Yale.
During Tuesday night's debate, Carson argued Democratic candidates, like front-runner Hillary Clinton, haven't faced the same type of scrutiny. In Clinton's case, Carson pointed to her handling as secretary of state of the terrorist attack on the US diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.
"And I don't even mind that so much if they do it with everybody like people on the other side," Carson said Tuesday night. "But when I look at somebody like Hillary Clinton, who sits there and tells her daughter and a government official that, 'No, this was a terrorist attack.'
"And then sits there and tells everybody else it was a video. Where I come from, they call that a lie. I think that's very different from somebody misinterpreting when I said I was offered a scholarship to West Point, that's the words that they use."
He added: "People who know me know that I'm an honest person."
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