Ben Carson: CNN Trying to ‘Smear’ Him by Suggesting He Wasn’t Violent

“You know, I’m not proud that I had these rage episodes”, the top-ranking GOP candidate told CNN “New Day” anchor Alisyn Camerota during a long-ranging, often contentious exchange. “But I am proud of the fact I was able to get over them”.

Protesting the coverage in an interview on Fox News on Thursday, Carson said: “I would say to the people of America, do you think I’m a pathological liar like CNN does?” They’re going to go back and try to find anything that I’ve ever said and try to get me on defensive about it in order to distract away from the things that are important.

Trump also seemed to be open to the possibility that Carson may have fabricated a few of his life story.

During an interview on CNN early Friday, Carson said the report was filled with “lies” and was “pathetic”.

“You talk to people primarily who knew me in high school who don’t know anything about, for instance, the lock situation that occurred at Wilson Junior High School”, he said, referencing one of the accountings in his book, where he says he hit a fellow teen with a lock hidden in his hand. No one challenged the stories directly.

For the record, Carson has said at age 14, he tried to kill someone identified as “Bob” in a disagreement over music on the radio. “Dr. Carson, I’m quoting – I’m not even quoting you, I’m playing your words”. “If you choose not to believe it, if it doesn’t fit the narrative that you want, that’s fine”.

In a report highly touted by CNN the day before, the network looked into the soft-spoken doctor’s claims of being a violent young teenager.

“I really don’t want to get into the details of who that person was”, he told Fox.

CNN had examined Carson’s claims about his past and concluded it was unable to verify any of the violent incidents the retired neurosurgeon had written about in his best-selling memoir, “Gifted Hands”, including stories that he had once tried to beat his mother with a hammer and had punched a classmate in the face. He told Camerota that the person in question was actually a family member, and that he talked to him on Thursday, and “he would prefer to stay out of the media”.

Carson called the media’s scrutiny of his candidacy unfair, compared to their investigations of Barack Obama, when the then-Illinois senator was running for the White House. Over the course of several sharp exchanges with the host, Carson laid out his failure to understand the role of the media in presidential contests. “And you’re just going to keep going back, “He said this 12 years ago” – it is just garbage. The beginning of a few in the media trying to end your candidacy?” she asked him.

“Because when I would have flashes of temper, it would only be the people who were directly involved”. We have the Russians in there. Promise you’re going to do that? And we have all seen through our own history of slavery and segregation what Democrats and Leftists do to black people who threaten their power. We have military deterioration when we have enemies who wanted to destroy us. “That would be a silly thing to do”.

“I have hundreds of thousands of petitions from my fellow Americans asking me to run for president”.

“I can easily figure out which side you are always going to be on”.

“I suspect it’s because I’m not a politician”.