CNN senior Washington correspondent Jeff Zeleny says Hillary Clinton’s campaign is refusing to provide more details corroborating Clinton’s story that in 1975 she attempted to join the Marine Corps, but was turned away.
Appearing on CNN’s “New Day” on Thursday, Zeleny explained “it seems so unusual that a Yale-educated lawyer who worked on the anti-war campaigns of McCarthy and McGovern, who had just moved to Arkansas, whose husband was about to become the Attorney General of the state would decide to want to join the Marines.”
When Zeleny reached out to Clinton’s campaign for a response, the campaign said, “they’re not going to add any more comment on this.” Zeleny explained, “So the questions are left to discuss here.”
“We do not have enough specifics actually to know if it’s true or not,” insisted Zeleny.
Wednesday, Clinton repeated an unverified story that she has been trotting out since 1994, when she first mentioned it on Capitol Hill, to a group of New Hampshire voters. Zeleny explained the story like this:
Around 1975 when she was around 26 or almost 27 years old, she said she went into a Marine recruiting office in Arkansas to ask if she could sign up. And she said the young officer who was working there was about 21 or so, he looked at her, he sized her up, he said, “No, the glasses, your age, no, you can’t. You may want to try the Army instead.”
Zeleny said that she “didn’t give any other explanation” to corroborate the story.
“So it’s one of those anecdotes that a candidate throws out and we often move on. Again, we’ve tried to ask some more questions about this to understand, if it’s possible, why she would have wanted to try and join the Marines after just moving to Arkansas,” explained Zeleny.