Marco Rubio’s team is pushing back against a CNN story alleging chaos within the Florida senator’s inner circle, and maintained Monday evening that it was never contacted for comment prior to the report’s publication.
“[It’s] utter nonsense,” Rubio campaign spokesman Alex Conant told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, adding that the cable news network’s story is “100 percent false.”
A CNN report by Jamie Gangel and Tal Kopan, titled “Some Rubio advisers say get out before Florida,” quoted supposedly well-placed sources who say some of Rubio’s confidants are encouraging the senator to drop out of the 2016 GOP primary before voting starts in his home state of Florida.
“A battle is being waged within Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s campaign about whether he should even remain in the Republican presidential race ahead of his home state primary on March 15, sources say,” reads the report, which was published Monday evening.
“Rubio himself is ‘bullish’ on his odds of winning the critical primary, despite some advisers who are less hopeful and believe a loss there would damage him politically in both the short- and long-term,” it added. “Publicly, the campaign is maintaining they are still a contender in this race, touting a Sunday win in Puerto Rico’s primary that delivered Rubio 23 delegates. But privately, the campaign is having a debate about whether he should remain in the mix — even for his home state of Florida’s primary.”
The online version of the story focuses on claims made by several anonymous campaign sources. However, when Gangel appeared on CNN later Monday evening to discuss her reporting, she seemed to suggest that the story’s chief claim, that people close to the senator are asking him to drop his bid for the White House, comes from a single anonymous source.
The number of nameless tipsters aside, Rubio’s team responded quickly by characterizing the story as “fiction,” and they said CNN never contacted them before they went live with the anonymously sourced report.
“[CNN’s Gangel] did not contact the campaign prior to coming on the show last hour before reporting that,” Conant continued in his interview on CNN. “It’s absolutely 100 percent false. CNN is doing a disservice to voters by airing that sort of reporting without even checking with the campaign.”
“Her sources, whatever they are, have no idea what the internal operations of the campaign are because if she did, she would know that Marco feels confident about Florida,” he added.
“I have a lot of respect for you,” Conant said to Blitzer, “but I’m going to have to ask you to stop reading that sort of fiction on air because it’s not true at all. If [Gangel] had good sources, she would know that’s not true. That’s fiction and CNN should stop reporting it,” he added.
The CNN anchor offered a defense for his network’s reporting, saying, “You don’t know. There may be some private advisers who aren’t necessarily coordinating with the campaign, just speaking as sometimes they do candidly to a journalist, right?”
“That’s just not the case,” the Rubio spokesman responded. “I was sitting in a senior staff meeting planning out next week’s schedule when I saw this report suddenly on the air.”
“CNN hadn’t asked us for comment before that. CNN went to air with a report without asking the campaign. How did that get to air without somebody asking the campaign for comment?” Conant asked.
“I assume Jamie Gangel and her producers did speak to —” Blitzer started.
“She did not,” said Conant.
“Maybe they didn’t speak to you but spoke to others?” Blitzer said.
“I did not talk to anybody that she spoke to,” Conant reiterated.
Recent polling shows that GOP front-runner Donald Trump’s lead in the Sunshine State has narrowed.
The Florida senator currently leads Trump by 48 percent to 23 percent “among the nearly 1-in-5 voters who have already cast their ballots in this ‘early vote’ state,” according to Monmouth Polling.
CNN did not respond immediately to a request for comment from the Washington Examiner’s media desk.
