Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) has asked his campaign spokesman to resign after he shared a video from the University of Pennsylvania’s student newspaper that implied fellow Republican presidential candidate Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) insulted the Bible.
The Daily Pennsylvanian recorded Rubio walking into the lobby of a hotel in South Carolina Saturday and running into Senator Ted Cruz’s father Rafael Cruz as well as Cruz’s campaign staffer. The video shows Rubio pointing to a Bible the staffer is holding and commenting on it though it’s unclear from the audio what exactly he says.
When the Daily Pennsylvanian initially posted their video however, the captions stated that Rubio said “not many answers” when pointing to the Bible, according to the Talking Points Memo. Ted Cruz’s national spokesman Rick Tyler then shared the video with the “not many answers” caption on Facebook Sunday.
Rubio’s spokesperson quickly responded to the video, stating that Rubio was misquoted in the caption. He then tweeted a video with what he claimed was the correct caption, showing that Rubio actually said, “Got a good book there. All the answers are in there,” when gesturing towards the Bible.
Rick Tyler later deleted the video from his Facebook page and issued an apology.
I want to apologize to Senator Marco Rubio for posting an inaccurate story about him here earlier today. The story...
Posted by Rick Tyler on Sunday, February 21, 2016
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He also explained the situation further during an interview with Fox News.
"The Daily Pennsylvanian put up that video and they put the captions of what they said was the transcript on that video," Tyler said. "I just checked it five minutes ago. The Daily Pennsylvanian is sticking by their transcript. Look, I know it to be wrong...He said there are a lot of answers in there and the transcript says the opposite. So I know it not to be true. I've asked the Daily Pennsylvanian to correct it and take it down. But they haven't done that."
Monday afternoon Ted Cruz told reporters he asked for Tyler’s resignation. While Cruz called Tyler a “good man,” he also said, “We are not a campaign that is going to question the faith of another candidate for president.”
Meanwhile the Daily Pennsylvanian removed the “not many answers” caption from the video. They also issued the following statement:
This article has been updated to remove a quote in the video by Marco Rubio that has been called into question, regarding the book the staffer was reading. We have replaced the video above with the raw footage without subtitles. Though our original transcription reflects what we originally heard, after reviewing the audio, we feel it is too unclear to say for sure. The transcription on the video was created and posted before a Cruz staffer told us that the book he was reading was the Bible. We showed the staffer in the video this footage on Sunday morning, and he did not correct our transcript. We have reached out to him for comment.
