Marco Rubio Fires Back at Jeb Bush Over Attack Ad
A super PAC supporting Jeb Bush's presidential run released an ad Tuesday criticizing Florida Sen. Marco Rubio for fundraising for his 2016 presidential campaign instead of participating in important Senate votes.
In the Right to Rise ad the narrator claims the junior senator skipped "important national security hearings and missed more total votes than any other senator" within the last three years.
The ad also states that Rubio missed a briefing held on Nov. 18 for all senators following the ISIS-inspired terror attacks in Paris.
"Days after the Paris attacks, senators came together for a top-secret briefing on the terrorist threat. Marco Rubio was missing -- fundraising in California instead," the ad's announcer says. "Two weeks later, terrorists struck again in San Bernardino. And where was Marco? Fundraising again in New Orleans."
In response, the Rubio camp shot back against the attack, calling the ad "intellectual dishonesty" since it fails to mention that Rubio attended a higher-level security briefing addressing the Paris attack on Nov. 17.
"Bush's team dishonestly omits that Marco is on the Senate's Intelligence Committee, where he attended the highest level briefings on the Paris attacks," said Rubio spokesman Alex Conant, according to MSNBC. "No other candidate for president has received more classified Intelligence briefings or better understands the threats facing our nation today than Marco. It's sad to see Jeb's 'joyful' campaign reduced to such intellectual dishonesty."
House Intelligence Committee member Rep. Mike Pompeo also came to Rubio's defense, saying the claims in the ad "are misleading and reflect a deep misunderstanding of Marco's critically important record working to keep Americans safe."
Meanwhile, Joe Pounder, the communications director for the Rubio campaign, shot back by tweeting a photo of Bush fundraising on the day of the San Bernardino shootings.
YIKES! @r2rusa didn't vet their ad, here's @JebBush fundraising when "terrorists struck again in San Bernardino" https://t.co/AA13wtNptC
— Joe Pounder (@PounderFile) December 29, 2015
Rubio's attendance record in the Senate has come under fire earlier this year. Last month, The Tampa Bay Times noted the Republican senator missed a number of Foreign Relations Committee hearings and classified briefings in order to attend campaign events. For instance, in January he missed an intelligence briefing on ISIS because he was fundraising in California while he dodged a Foreign Relations hearing on the humanitarian crisis in the Middle East in September.
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