Riding a boost in the polls following his performance in last week’s Republican presidential candidate’s debate, Florida Sen.
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The new statements for Rubio’s Republican Party of Florida American Express card cover the period from January 2005 to October 2006.
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”.
In his 2012 memoir “An American Son” that almost all were for party business, “but from time to time a few personal expenses were charged to the card as well”. It included what his marketing crusade acknowledged was greater than $7,200 for eight personal expenditures. (There was $117,000 in charges previously disclosed and today’s release covered another $65,000.) Of that total, $23,252.50 in charges were for personal expenses, according to Rubio.
On Tuesday, the Tampa Bay Times rehashed a years-worn controversy dealing with Rubio’s tenure in Florida politics as speaker of the House. But the Rubio campaign explained the charges the very next day (the Apple Store purchase was for a new hard-drive for political files).
Questions over the personal charges first emerged in 2010 during his successful U.S. Senate campaign.
Rubio dismissed the charges as old news and said he did nothing wrong.
Jeb Bush all but encouraged the news media to pursue the issue Wednesday, highlighting his own voluminous financial disclosures and suggesting that scrutiny of Rubio’s handling of money was entirely reasonable. “By releasing the statements, the Florida senator seems to be trying to get beyond a story that is weighing on his campaign just as it shows signs of gaining steam”. “He is a disaster with his credit cards”, the businessman and television personality told a press conference.
“If there was a policy, no one knew it, not the party spokesperson, not Marco, not former Speaker Dean Cannon who also put personal charges on his card, not anyone else”, Harris wrote. Despite years of requests, Rubio still hasn’t released records from his earlier use of the card, the Times reports.
The Republican Party of Florida paid for none of the senator’s personal expenses.
Conant also called Fasano’s argument politically motivated, pointing out that Fasano has supported Bush, who has begun aggressively attacking Rubio over the past two weeks, and that Fasano has declined to support Rubio in previous races.
Rubio told Karl it was important to make the distinction between a “credit card” and a “charge card”. One of the newly released records, for example, shows a $180 charge for Hoop It-Kick, an activity center; the following month’s American Express bill shows a payment in that amount.
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“I find it ironic that the only person running for president that’s ever declared a bankruptcy, four times in the last 25 years, is attacking anyone’s finances”, Rubio said when reporters asked about the feud.
