WASHINGTON – An Iowa college student pulled back the curtain on Hillary Rodham Clinton‘s stage-managed campaign stops – claiming the candidate seemed to know to call on her for a canned question at a cooked-up event that was passed off as spontaneous.
Muriel Gallo-Chasanoff, 19, said a Clinton staffer waved her off the question she first wanted to ask – then produced a binder with a series of questions she could ask.
The binder, she said, had about eight questions.
“The top one was planned specifically for a college student,” she said. “It said ‘college student’ in brackets and then the question.”
Gallo-Chasanoff set off a media furor over planted questions that threw the Clinton camp back on its heels when she told her school newspaper that she asked a “canned” question at an event last week in Newton, Iowa.
She told CNN yesterday that a Clinton staffer approached her before the event and asked if she would pose the candidate a question.
Gallo-Chasanoff said she proposed a question about how Clinton’s energy plan compared to other candidates’ plans.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said the staffer told her, “because I don’t know how familiar she is with their plans.”
She decided to be “agreeable” and ask the question from Clinton’s wish list: “As a young person, I’m worried about the long-term effects of global warming. How does your plan combat climate change?”
“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 the area,” she said.
The campaign has admitted planting the question but denied Clinton knew about it – and yesterday wouldn’t answer whether they had a binder with prepared questions.
Spokesman Blake Zeff said: “The senator had no idea who she was calling on, and this is not an acceptable campaign process.”
Gallo-Chasanoff says the Clinton camp tried to get her to keep quiet after she asked a reporter with her school paper, the Scarlet & Black, to alert the campaign to its scoop.
She said a campaign staffer called and told her “not to talk about” the story to more media.