Crowley refuses to backtrack as Romney surrogate says fact check ‘not your place’

“Goodness, I hope they get back to one another,” Crowley replied, adding that her comments following the debate were “exactly the same” as the original fact check. “He did say ‘acts of terror,’ call it an act of terror, but, Gov. Romney, you are perfectly right that it took weeks for them to get past the tape.”

“Not a backtrack?” O’Brien wondered.

“No!” Crowley said. “Now, did the president say, ‘This was an act of terror’? The president did not say [that], he said, these ‘acts of terror.’ But he was in the Rose Garden to talk about Benghazi so I don’t think that’s a leap.”

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), who was appearing on Wednesday morning’s CNN panel as a Romney surrogate, told Crowley that “it wasn’t necessarily your place to try to be fact checker right there. I happen to think that your assessment of that was wrong. … It’s not the role of the moderator to say, ‘Mr. President, you’re right.’”

“Nonsense,” CNN liberal contributor Roland Martin quipped. “The congressman is dead wrong. If you stand there and say something that is wrong, you should be corrected on the spot. Look, I have no problem even having a table of fact checkers there. We shouldn’t wait until the debate is over and then have different people saying, this was right, this was wrong. More people are watching that singular debate than they’re watching anyone’s particular coverage.”

“And so if you say something and it’s wrong, you check them right then,” he added.