Ben Carson quips: 'Thank you for not asking what I said in the 10th grade'
"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.
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.
"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."