Will Ron Paul's Racist Newsletters Hurt His Chances in Iowa?

Rep. Ron Paul appeared Thursday on Iowa's WHO-AM with Jan Mickelson and confronted questions about the racially charged statements and other controversial comments in newsletters published in his name in the 1980s and 1990s.

Throughout the interview, Paul faced scrutiny over how it was possible for him not to know about the content of his decades-old newsletters. In this clip, the caller asks Paul how confident he is that the newsletters accurately portrayed his views "on taxes, on monetary policy, the Second Amendment, the Tenth Amendment, all the things that you hold dear?"

Paul admitted that he wrote a "certain portion" of the newsletters on economics, but insisted that he wasn't the one who wrote the offensive parts. He called the racist statements "terrible," but added that the offensive comments totaled only about "eight or 10 sentences." He explained:

“This was in between, it would be an investment letter. This would be material that I would turn in, and it would become part of the letter. But there were many times when I didn’t edit the whole letter, and things got put in. And I didn’t even really become aware of the details of that until many years later when somebody else called and said, you know what was in it? But these were sentences that were put in, a total of eight or ten sentences, and it was bad stuff. It wasn’t a reflection of my views at all.”

Photo Credit: Jayel Aheram