Candy Crowley: I didn’t backtrack on Libya in debate

October 17, 2012

On ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan said that Crowley had already taken back the first part of that statement. “The moderator said that she — that he was right in the main on this, that she wasn’t correct in pointing out that he made reference to this being a specific terrorist attack,” he said.

What Crowley said on CNN after the debate: Romney “was right in the main, I just think he picked the wrong word.” But on the same network Wednesday morning, she said she was in no way taking back her original interjection.

“Listen, what I said on that stage is the same thing I said to you actually last night,” she told Soledad O’Brian. “[W]e got hung up on this ‘yes he said,’ ‘no I didn’t,’ ‘I said terror,’ ‘you didn’t say terror.’ … So I said, [President Obama] did say ‘acts of terror, call it an act of terror, but Governor Romney, you are perfectly right that it took weeks for them to get past the tape.’”

Asked if that was a backtrack, Crowley said, “No. The question was — we got so stuck on that ‘act of terror.’ Now, did the President say this was an act of terror? The president did not say — he said ‘these acts of terror,’ but he was in the Rose Garden to talk about Benghazi, so I don’t think that’s a leap.” (The exact phrase Obama used: “no acts of terror.”)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/wp/2012/10/17/candy-crowley-i-didnt-backtrack-on-libya-in-debate/