Rubio in New Hampshire campaigning was faced with new fresh questions over the spending on the credit card after a report in the Tampa Bay Times had highlighted the senator’s failure to make his statement of his credit card public from when he served in the state legislature in Florida.
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Rubio sometimes used the card for personal expenses and paid them directly to American Express, according to his campaign, but a few of those charges have been previously unreported. The amount totals about half of the $117,000 Rubio charged on the party’s credit card after he was speaker of the Florida House from 2007 to 2008.
Rubio also said that the Amex bills were “mailed to me at home”. “Donald was a supporter of amnesty and the DREAM Act, he changed his position on those issues just to run for president”, Rubio said.
Marco Rubio ran for and was elected to the U.S. Senate by Floridians.
On Tuesday, real estate tycoon and GOP frontrunner Donald Trump, while promoting his new book, attacked Rubio’s financial history and accused him of living above his means.
“He’s starting to get hit hard on his credit-card things and other things that they’re finding out”. A Republican strategist tells the Times Rubio once admitted to using the card for “flooring” in his home.
“Right now, the establishment money guys are wondering, If not Bush, then who?” said Saul Anuzis, a former chair of the MI Republican Party who is backing Cruz.
“I obviously don’t come from a wealthy family”, he said in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America”.
For his part, Rubio has told the press that the party “never paid a single personal expense of mine”, noting that since it was an American Express card, he was required to pay the balance of his personal charges back each month. He pulled the wrong credit card from his wallet to pay for flooring for his house.
The campaign said that Rubio wasn’t talking about statements from those years.
Strategists and donors say the pressure is on Rubio to show that he is ready to unseat Bush, who has tumbled in the polls, as the first choice among the Republican establishment. An ethics panel in Florida officially cleared Mr. Rubio of wrongdoing in 2012.
One such expense? A vacation that piggybacked off a business trip to Las Vegas.
Rubio insists he used his own money to reimburse Republicans for personal charges, though his campaign conceded over the weekend “it could not provide full documentation proving Mr. Rubio had paid the personal charges himself because the corresponding personal bank statements were too old to be retrievable”. Then a top Florida fundraiser defected from Bush’s camp to Rubio’s.
That included two charges during a trip to Walt Disney World, where his campaign said the Republican Party of Florida held most of its fundraisers.
Even with the release of the statements, CNN could not independently verify which charges were personal and which were business-related. “I’m proud of where I come from”.
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Numerous charges disclosed Saturday are for mundane expenses, such as $6.19 at Burger King in August 2005 and countless gas station expenses.
