The college student who says she was told what question to ask at one of New York Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign events said Monday that “voters have the right to know what happened” and she wasn’t the only one who was planted.
The 19-year-old sophomore at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, said that giving anyone specific questions to ask is “dishonest,” and the whole incident has given her a negative outlook on politics.
Muriel Gallo-Chasanoff, said what happened was really pretty simple: She says a senior Clinton staffer asked if she’d like to ask the senator a question after an energy speech the Democratic presidential hopeful gave in Newton, Iowa, on November 6.
“I sort of thought about it, and I said ‘Yeah, can I ask how her energy plan compares to the other candidates’ energy plans?’” Gallo-Chasanoff said.
“‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,” the staffer said, according to Gallo-Chasanoff, “because I don’t know how familiar she is with their plans.”
He then opened a binder to a page that, according to Gallo-Chasanoff, had about eight questions on it.
“The top one was planned specifically for a college student,” she added. ” It said ‘college student’ in brackets and then the question.”
Topping that sheet of paper was the following: “As a young person, I’m worried about the long-term effects of global warming. How does your plan combat climate change?”
The Clinton campaign has issued a statement when the planting story first broke and said that Hillary had no idea that one of the people she had called on was a plant.
Gallo-Chasanoff isn’t convinced.
“I don’t know whether Hillary knew what my question was going to be, but it seemed like she knew to call on me because there were so many people, and … I was the only college student in that area,” she said.
Earlier in the week the Clinton campaign also issued a statement admitting that a staff member did discuss questions about energy policy at the forum, but this not standard practice and would never happen again.
Gallo-Chasanoff says that’s also untrue.
“After the event,” she said, “I heard another man … talking about the question he asked, and he said that the campaign had asked him to ask that question.”
The man she referenced prefaced his question by saying that it probably didn’t have anything to do with energy, and then posed the following: “I wonder what you propose to do to create jobs for the middle-class person, such as here in Newton where we lost Maytag.”
A Maytag factory in Newton recently closed, forcing hundreds of people out of their jobs.
You mean politics are dishonest?? Say it isn’t so!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
-Chris Jones
