Ben Carson throws his wife under the bus for purchase of $31,000 dining set

Screenshot/C-SPAN

HUD Secretary Ben Carson

• Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson is under fire for spending $31,000 on a lavish dining set for his office.
• Carson suggested during a Tuesday House committee hearing that his wife, Candy Carson, was to blame for the extravagant spending. 
• The secretary also said that the new dining room furniture was necessary for safety reasons. 

Ben Carson, the secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, suggested Tuesday that his wife, Candy Carson, was to blame for the purchase of a $31,000 mahogany dining room set for his office. 

During testimony before a House committee, Carson said HUD's dining room furniture needed to be replaced for safety reasons. 

"People were being stuck by nails, a chair had collapsed with somebody sitting in it," Carson told the committee during his first hearing before Congress since the controversial purchase was reported last month. 

So he asked Candy to help with the redecoration efforts. 

"I left it with my wife," he said. "The next thing that I, quite frankly, heard about it was that this $31,000 table had been bought."

Carson noted that he did briefly peruse furniture catalogs before the purchase was made and was unhappy with what he thought were extravagant prices. 

"My wife also looked at catalogs and wanted to be sure that the color of the chair fabric of any set that was chosen matched the rest of the decor," Carson wrote in a March 1 statement. 

Carson insisted that he had the furniture order canceled "immediately" after he found out about it and told the committee that the idea that he was spending lavishly on his own office while simultaneously cutting the agency's budget "makes for a wonderful story ... but it bears no resemblance to the truth." 

But, he added, HUD "used the opportunity" to try to figure out what "internal controls" had allowed the purchase to be made in the first place. 

"We finally got a CFO in December and we've been able to address those," he said, referring to the agency's new chief financial officer. 

Carson's spending first attracted scrutiny when a former top HUD official, Helen Foster, filed a complaint with the Office of Special Counsel over the spending. Foster claimed Carson's wife pressured her to find a way around the $5,000 legal price limit for the office redecoration, then retaliated against her when she refused.

Foster said she was told that "$5,000 will not even buy a decent chair" and "we have to find the money."

The controversy was enough to trigger a House Oversight Committee investigation. Rep. Trey Gowdy, the committee chairman, sent Carson's staff a letter in late February demanding documents on office furnishings since the beginning of 2017 and an explanation for the $31,000 purchase.

A HUD spokesman initially denied that Carson and his wife had anything to do with the purchase and said the table was bought by "career staffers in charge of the building." 

But internal emails show that HUD staffers repeatedly consulted with Candy about redecorating the office. 

The White House is also reportedly furious over the controversy, and senior aides have intervened in HUD's communications strategy to contain the fallout, CNN reported.

But the Carsons maintain there was "no dishonesty or wrongdoing."

"Thank you to so many who have expressed concern for me and my family over the latest accusations," Carson wrote in a tweet earlier this month on the couple's joint account. "All the numbers and evidence are being gathered and a full disclosure is forthcoming."

Michelle Mark contributed to this report.