Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson pulled in $3.5 million in campaign donations this week after furiously fighting off media reports Friday that he lied about his childhood and admission into West Point.

The $3.5 million was accompanied by 100,000 new followers on Facebook.

“What I have always said about the media is being proven for everyone to see,” Carson said in a Facebook post. “But I have news for them. This week alone we raised $3,500,000.00 from almost 70,000 donations. Just here on Facebook we have gained over 100,000 new followers this week.”

“Their bias will only make us grow bigger, better and bolder!” he added.

Politico published a story Friday claiming that Carson’s campaign had admitted that he had lied about acceptance and admission into West Point.

The only problem is that Carson had admitted no such thing.

“The Politico story is an outright Lie,” Doug Watts, spokesman for Carson, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

In fact, Carson never said he either admitted or applied to the school, despite being the top ROTC student in Detroit. While he briefly considered the option after receiving what he referred to as an informal offer from the top American general during the Vietnam War, he ultimately chose Yale, which is the only school to which he had applied.

Shortly after Carson released his statement Friday, Politico backtracked and pulled the main sentence on the story by reporter Kyle Cheney, adding that it had “updated” the story, but did not provide any further context.

Carson stated Friday that some people are trying everything they can to sink his campaign by digging deep into his past and looking for dirt.

“There is a desperation on behalf of some to try to find ways to tarnish me because they’ve been looking through everything, they have been talking to everybody I’ve ever known, everybody I’ve ever seen,” Carson told reporters in Florida, CNN reports.

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