Carson says it’s ‘time really to move on’ from questions about his biography
WASHINGTON — Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson said Sunday that he is receiving more scrutiny than others who have run for president, just days after media reports raised new questions about the inspiring personal narrative he has used to make millions of dollars and thrust himself to the front of the GOP race.
“There’s no question I’m getting special scrutiny,” Carson, a neurosurgeon and author who has topped several recent GOP primary polls, said during an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “There are a lot of people who are very threatened. They’re worried. There is no question about it.”
On Friday afternoon, Politico published a piece in which it called an anecdote from Carson’s biography — that he was offered and turned down a fullride scholarship to West Point — a “fabrication.” By Friday evening, the Wall Street Journal had followed up with a piece that questioned other tales from Carson’s life story, which has been central to his appeal to GOP voters.
That piece questioned his recollections about high school, including a claim that he protected white students during a race riot, and about college, including a claim that was profiled in the Yale Daily News because he was the only student in a course not to walk out after being told that they would have to retake an exam.
In interviews with former classmates and others at Carson’s high school and at Yale, the Wall Street Journal could not find anyone to support his claims.
Questions about the accuracy of other tales Carson has told in his books and on the campaign trail have preceded these latest reports, though. For years, he has spoken of having attempted to stab a close friend back in the day, but facing new scrutiny, he said last week that it was a cousin he had attempted to stab. In an account given earlier this year, Carson claimed to have once been threatened by an armed robber while eating at a Popeye’s restaurant in Baltimore. However, critics noted that Carson is a vegetarian, and Baltimore police say they have no record of the robbery.
But Carson has insisted that those questions are unfair, and on Sunday he repeated his stance that the level of scrutiny to which he is being subjected has never been applied to others who have sought the presidency, including President Barack Obama.
“I have always said that I expect to be vetted, but being vetted and what is going on with me — ‘You said this 30 years ago, you said this 20 years ago, this didn’t exist’ ... I have not seen that with anyone else,” Carson said during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” in which he said his biography is being picked through because he is a threat to the “secular progressive movement in this country.”
“It’s time to really move on,” he said. “It’s not time to spend every single day talking about something that happened 50 years ago.”
Carson has insisted that his West Point story is at worst exaggerated but largely accurate — that he met with top military officials who told him they could get him into the academy and that his tuition would be covered. He said on “Face the Nation” that he has found the Yale Daily News photo of him being praised as the most “honest” student in that college psychology course.
As for those white students he says he protected during riots after the death of Martin Luther King Jr., Carson said that just because no one has come forward to confirm his story does not mean that they will not eventually.
“Maybe one of those students will come forward, I don’t know,” Carson said during the “Meet the Press” interview. “Maybe they’re not spending all of their time reading the Wall Street Journal.”