Ben Carson, USA presidential hopeful, lied about acceptance to West Point

Those stories, and the apparently false claim that he got a full ride to the Military Academy at West Point, are garnering attention.

Carson’s campaign says the Republican White House hopeful was not offered a formal scholarship to the United States Military Academy at West Point as he wrote in his autobiography.

Following the Politico story published Friday, the Carson campaign sought to clarify the candidate’s story about his interest in attending West Point in his breakout book, “Gifted Hands”, in which he outlines his participation with the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, commonly known as ROTC, while in high school. “He was told that they would process his admission and that they would get him in and he chose not to seek admission, nor did he apply”.

“That position allowed me the chance to meet four-star general William Westmoreland, who had commanded all American forces in Vietnam before being promoted to Army Chief of Staff at the Pentagon in Washington, DC”, he wrote. Nobody is launching a years-long campaign to find Carson’s birth certificate, or trying to figure out if he’s a secret Muslim hell-bent on somehow becoming a dictator. But West Point told CNN on Friday that it does not keep records of decades-old applications, and would not be able to know if Carson was offered an appointment because he did not attend. The episode has figured prominently in the former neurosurgeon’s presentation of himself, even appearing as an anecdote in his autobiography “Gifted Hands”. At West Point, tuition and other expenses are paid by the government.

“Those claims are absolutely true”, Carson told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly on Thursday.

“They know”, Mr Carson concluded.

This all centers on how Carson said in the book that he, “was offered a full scholarship” to West Point.

David Brody: Right, so just so I understand, the beef that the campaign, yourself have with Politico is that they started to go down this normal path of applying an admission process, and you’re saying is that they got that wrong because that’s not the way it went down. Asking if he had made a mistake in recounting the story, he said, “I don’t think so”.

Carson’s mischaracterization of his West Point story follows scrutiny of inconsistencies about his story of almost stabbing someone with a knife as a teenager.

Carson is now one of two front-runners for the Republican nomination in the 2016 presidential race.

Especially when responding to reporters asking who was involved in a stabbing incident Carson claims happened during his angry teenage years.

CNN spoke with nine friends, classmates and neighbors who grew up with Carson, and none of them had any memory of the anger or violence the candidate has described.