Via CBS:
Sen. Ted Cruz on Monday announced that he had asked his spokesman Rick Tyler to resign that morning after his campaign pushed a video that made it appear like Sen. Marco Rubio was mocking a Cruz staffer’s bible.
“This morning, I asked for Rick Tyler’s resignation,” Cruz told reporters. “I have made clear in this campaign we will conduct this campaign with the very highest standards and integrity.”
Rubio lashed out against the Cruz campaign Monday morning for the video that shows him walking past a Cruz staffer reading the Bible and according to the on-screen text, telling that staffer there are “not many answers” in the Scripture he was reading.
Rubio called the move “incredibly disturbing,” and characterized it as part of a “pattern” of “deceptive and untrue” tactics that he believes have come to define the Cruz campaign. Rubio said the words on the screen did not reflect what he said in reality.
“I know exactly what I said to that young man,” Rubio told reporters in Las Vegas. “I said the answer to every question you’ll ever have is in that book. And then I pointed to the Book of Proverbs which he was reading, and I said particularly that one which is a book of wisdom.”
The video was initially posted by student reporters from the University of Pennsylvania’s newspaper, the DailyPennsylvanian, who witnessed the conversation in the lobby of the Columbia Hampton Inn Saturday morning, where they were also having breakfast.
Rubio “was presumably not expecting to run into Rafael Cruz, father of presidential candidate Ted Cruz, and Cruz campaign staffer Christian Collins,” the paper wrote. “However, once he saw them he decided to have some fun with them.”