Rubio releases Florida GOP charge card statements

Back in 2008, the Miami Herald discovered that Rubio failed to disclose, “a $135,000 home-equity loan he obtained from a bank controlled by his political supporters”.

An August 2007 trip to Boston, included food and hotel charges adding up to $1,221.

The group also has a similar name to a super-PAC supporting Rubio, the Conservative Solutions PAC, and even shares a few staff, according to the letter, which cited news reports. Nevertheless, the young ladies watching him at the grill appear thoroughly unimpressed.

His campaign pointed to a 2010 statement from a state GOP spokeswoman who said, “The (Republican Party of Florida) American Express card is a corporate card and is meant to be used for business expenses, but if personal expenses are charged to the card, the Party trusts that individual cardholders will reimburse the Party for those expenses”.

But as his presidential campaign experiences a surge in the polls, Rubio’s rivals are rushing to resurrect the matter in an attempt to portray him as a careless manager of money, despite Rubio’s assurances that he paid for every personal purchase himself.

Rubio has long said he would occasionally pull out his party American Express card to pay for personal items by mistake. “I’m in Florida all the time, and for years I’ve been hearing that his credit cards are a disaster”.

Of those charges, one was accidental. Lee outlined facts related to the issue of the Republican presidential candidate’s charges to the card between 2005 and 2009, and concluded that “based on the information released so far, a mountain’s been made out of [a] molehill, by the media and Rubio’s opponents”. The Florida Republican Party was responsible for paying off the cards on a monthly basis.

Rubio has said he paid back more than $16,000 in charges he had placed on the card.

GOP guidelines for party transactions are buttressed by IRS rules that restrict spending to the sole objective of “influencing elections”, noted the Tampa Bay Times.

The Rubio campaign released previously undisclosed billing records Saturday for 2005 and a portion of 2006. The prosecutor for the commission found that the “level of negligence” exhibited by Rubio in confusing his cards, and then approving the reimbursement requests without recognizing the error, was “disturbing”.

Paul used a question about Hillary Clinton’s foreign policies to take another jab at Rubio.

Marco Rubio has and will always be a puppet of the money people who pay for his runs for elected office. Rubio responded by quickly amending his financial disclosures and dismissing the whole thing as an oversight.

He’s been drawing sizable crowds in New Hampshire, whose first-in-the-nation primary is on February 9, and he is committed to returning to the state over and over again in the coming weeks.

“I think they’re going to slug it out for a while”, Cruz said, predicting a battle between Rubio, former Florida governor Jeb Bush and others. His spokesman, Alex Conant, said Wednesday that those expenses were for party business, and that the state GOP paid them.