Romney: Candy Crowley Inserting Herself Into Debate 'Was a Mistake on Her Part'

On Hugh Hewitt’s radio show on Monday night, 2012 Republican presidential and former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) revisited his presidential debate with President Barack Obama that was moderated by CNN’s Candy Crowley. Crowley interrupted an integral part of the debate about the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.

Partial transcript as follows:

HEWITT: Now in the film, Mitt, the conversation comes up, that sequence in the debate and Candy Crowley’s intervention in it. But the only negative word, Mrs. Romney at one point says Candy Crowley and sort of mutters under her breath. Did you feel she was unfair at that moment in the debate?

ROMNEY: Well, I don’t think it’s the role of the moderator in a debate to insert themselves into the debate and to declare a winner or a loser on a particular point. And I must admit that at that stage, I was getting a little upset at Candy, because in a prior setting where I was to have had the last word, she decided that Barack Obama was to get the last word despite the rules that we had. So she obviously thought it was her job to play a more active role in the debate than was agreed upon by the two candidates, and I thought her jumping into the interaction I was having with the president was also a mistake on her part, and one I would have preferred to carry out between the two of us, because I was prepared to go after him for misrepresenting to the American people that the nature of the attack.

HEWITT: Do you think that even today the nature of that attack is being misrepresented by the former Secretary of State and the President?

ROMNEY: You know, I think they have now come to the conclusion that in fact, it was organized in part by an affiliate of al Qaeda, which was very different than what they told the American people in the two weeks following the attack. And as to what happened on the night of the attack and what actions were taken, that’s just something we just don’t know the full story on, and I think people still wonder what happened there. I don’t know that there’s a cover-up effort going on, but I do know that it’s something which I think deserves to be fully examined.