‘I Hate To Say This’: Dem Admits He ‘Was Pained’ By Tim Walz’s ‘Tortured Answer’ On China During Debate

‘I Hate To Say This’: Dem Admits He ‘Was Pained’ By Tim Walz’s ‘Tortured Answer’ On China During Debate

‘I Hate To Say This’: Dem Admits He ‘Was Pained’ By Tim Walz’s ‘Tortured Answer’ On China During Debate

NewsNation political contributor and Democrat A. Scott Bolden acknowledged Wednesday his disappointment with Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s response regarding his false claim of being in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre.

When Walz faced a question during the vice presidential debate on Tuesday about the discrepancy that CNN reported, he initially failed to address it. Bolden, on “NewsNation Now,” described Walz’s response as exceptionally “tortured” and said it “pained” him to hear it, noting his reluctance to criticize a fellow Democrat.

WATCH:

“Me and [NewsNation political contributor] Sean [Spicer] can agree on one thing: That had to be the most tortured answer a candidate could give … All he had to say in the beginning was what he said at the end: ‘I misspoke, and I’m a knucklehead.’ He gave this long diatribe. I hate to say this as a Democrat, but I was pained listening to that answer,” Bolden said, laughing.

Walz acknowledged his imperfections during the debate but touted his record in Congress when he answered the initial question.

“I’ve tried to do the best I can, but I’ve not been perfect, and I’m a knucklehead at times, but it’s always been about them. Those same people elected me to Congress for 12 years, and in Congress, I was one of the most bipartisan people working on things like farm bills that we got done and working on veterans’ benefit,” Walz said during the debate, adding that sometimes he gets “caught up in the rhetoric.”

When he faced a follow-up question from the moderator, Walz replied, “All I said on this was I got there that summer and misspoke on this. So I, I will, just, that is what I said. So I was in Hong Kong and China during the Democracy protests [inaudible], and from that I learned a lot about what needed to be in governance.”

The governor has also misrepresented his military rank and claimed to have carried weapons “in war” despite leaving his battalion before its deployment to Iraq in 2005.

Spicer asserted Walz’s falsehood about being in Hong Kong when the Tiananmen Square Massacre was occurring is part of a pattern of “lying.”

“What Tim Walz does, though, is lying. He’s lied about his record in the military. He’s lied about awards that he hasn’t received. And in this case, he lied about being in Tiananmen Square … How do you mistake not being at Tiananmen Square when that historic event occurred? He lied about it,” Spicer said. “He wasn’t mistaken, he didn’t misspeak, this wasn’t poor grammar. He lied. He, for decades, has been telling people that he was in Tiananmen Square when that historic event took place.”

“And when a photograph came out that proved he wasn’t there, he gave a two-minute word salad that said, ‘Yeah, sometimes I misspeak.’ You’re not a knucklehead, you’re a liar,” he added.