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 Also on Friday, Carson's account of how he attempted to stab a
friend in his troubled youth came under renewed scrutiny.
Carson, a favorite of conservative activists, who is tied with
Donald Trump at the top of Republican primary polls a year before
the November 2016 presidential election, has often recounted both
tales from his 1990 autobiography on the campaign trail, as he
trumpets his rise from poverty in inner-city Detroit to the highest
echelons of medicine.
Questions about Carson's account of the West Point scholarship came
to the fore after a report by political news website Politico on
differing accounts of the scholarship.
On Friday, Carson's campaign said he never sought admission to West
Point, and Carson himself angrily denied suggestions that he had
misrepresented the facts surrounding the West Point overture.
At a news conference in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, Carson said he
rejected the offer and never filed an application to the school.
 "It didn't go to that extent," Carson said. "It was an offer to me.
It was specifically made."
The normally mild-mannered Carson showed flashes of anger and
sarcasm during the news conference. He accused the media of
targeting him and said his supporters would see through the
"subterfuge."
"They understand that this is a witch hunt," Carson said.
Carson, separately, also gave a slightly different account of the
stabbing incident, describing the boy he lunged at as a close
relative instead of a friend.
“These are little things that get at his credibility," said John
Feehery, a Republican strategist who is not working for any of the
2016 presidential candidates. "He’s coming in there as an outsider
who is honest and a breath of fresh air. If his whole life story is
undermined by these little inaccuracies it could have a negative
effect.”
Carson's supporters seemed unperturbed, and doubted whether their
candidate had been inaccurate.
“If I had a general come up to me when I was 17 years old and try to
convince me to go to West Point and he told me my expenses would be
paid, I don’t think it would be so far-fetched to think he offered
me a scholarship,” said Warren Galkin, 86, of Warwick, Rhode Island,
who has given money to a political action committee supporting
Carson's campaign.
Laura Stoker, a political science professor at the University of
California, Berkeley, said: "Voters care about candidate integrity.
But people - especially those who already favor Carson - will resist
allegations until information is definitive."
 WEST POINT SCHOLARSHIP
In his autobiography, "Gifted Hands," Carson wrote that as a high
school student he dined with General William Westmoreland in 1969.
"Later I was offered a full scholarship to West Point," he wrote,
saying that he turned it down. "As overjoyed as I felt to be offered
such a scholarship, I wasn't really tempted."
Carson's campaign said on Friday that his grades and conversations
with officials of the ROTC, which provides preliminary military
training for students interested in becoming officers, constituted a
de facto acceptance to the academy, which provides full scholarships
to all of its students. But it said Carson never actually applied.
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"His Senior Commander was in touch with West Point and told Dr.
Carson he could get in, Dr. Carson did not seek admission," Carson's
campaign spokesman Doug Watts told Reuters in an email. "He never
said he was admitted or even applied," Watts said.
West Point on Friday said there was no record of Carson completing
an application for admission. It is possible someone nominated him
for the academy, but that would only have been an early step in the
admission process.
West Point spokeswoman Theresa Brinkerhoff, in an email to Reuters,
said that files of candidates who did not seek admission are kept
for only three years. "Therefore we cannot confirm whether anyone
during that time period was nominated to West Point if they chose
not to pursue completion of the application process," she said.
Watts called the story in Politico, which was headlined "Ben Carson
admits fabricating West Point scholarship, "an outright lie."
"The campaign never 'admitted to anything,'" Watts said in an email
to Reuters.
CARSON HITS BACK
The fracas over West Point came only hours after Carson attacked the
media for questioning his accounts of a violent past.
“This is a bunch of lies,” Carson told CNN on Friday. “This is what
it is, it’s a bunch of lies attempting, you know, to say that I’m
lying about my history. I think it’s pathetic."
Carson, who is popular with evangelical voters, often speaks on the
campaign trail about flashes of violence during his youth, casting
the lessons he learned from that period as evidence he has the
strength of character to be president.
 In his autobiography, the renowned brain surgeon wrote that as a
teen, he tried to stab a friend named Bob in the stomach with a
knife, but the boy's belt buckle blocked the knife.
On Thursday on the campaign trail, when pressed by reporters about
the incident and also in an interview with Fox News, Carson said
that Bob's name, along with some others in the autobiography, were
pseudonyms used to protect the privacy of the people he wrote about.
He described Bob in the book as a friend and classmate. In a Fox
News interview and on CNN, Carson said the boy was a "close
relative."
(Additional reporting by Zachary Fagenson in Palm Beach, Florida,
Grant Smith in New York, and Doina Chiacu and Bill Trott in
Washington; Writing by Bill Rigby; Editing by Howard Goller and
Leslie Adler)
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