Here's that Right to Rise ad targeting Rubio on his use of the FLGOP credit card: https://t.co/k5pGvNBX2V pic.twitter.com/FQ1Xf34Ky6
— Alexandra Jaffe (@ajjaffe)
January 26, 2016
Right to Rise, the super PAC backing Jeb Bush, is out with a new TV ad attacking Marco Rubio over his use of a Florida Republican party credit card.
The ad's narrator says: "Car repairs, home improvements, a family trip. It's not easy to afford them. What did Marco Rubio do? He put $22,000 in personal expenses on a Republican Party credit card."
The ad says Rubio caused a "scandal," and it easily leaves viewers with the impression that Rubio used state party funds for personal gain. But that's not true.
Rubio reimbursed the party for all personal expenses each month. "Every month I would go through it. If there was a personal expense, I paid it. If it was a Party expense, the Party paid it," Rubio said in November. "The Republican Party never paid a single personal expense of mine."
The Washington Post Fact Checker wrote that a "mountain's been made out of molehill, by the media and Rubio's opponents." Rubio's statement was "accurate enough that it does not warrant even a single Pinocchio," the Post concluded. When Rubio released two more years of credit card statements, THE WEEKLY STANDARD's Steve Hayes reported there was nothing unusual about Rubio's expenses and reimbursements.
Rubio has been "on the receiving end of some $20 million of the roughly $22 million that Right to Rise spent on negative ads between early December and this past weekend," Hayes reported on Saturday.
Charlie Crist, the liberal former GOP governor of Florida, first tried to make an issue of Rubio's credit card use in the 2010 Florida Senate race. Bush endorsed Rubio in the 2010 race and said in 2012 that he hoped Rubio would be picked as Mitt Romney's running mate.