Late Thursday, news broke that the National Enquirer was running a story that Ted Cruz was extra-marital affairing his god damn dick off.
Not one mistress, not two, not three, not four, but five.
Five.
The story hasn’t really picked up steam, possibly because we all stopped caring over the weekend, but now it’s back in the news.
That’s because everyone assumed it was Donald Trump who gave the story to The Enquirer.
Turns out it wasn’t. Turns out it was another candidate, one who himself couldn’t get past Cruz in the primaries, eventually being forced to withdraw from the campaign after routinely losing to Cruz in state after state.
That’s right, shoutout to Marco Rubio’s campaign for finally doing something.
A half-dozen GOP operatives and media figures tell The Daily Beast that Cruz’s opponents have been pushing charges of adultery for at least six months now—and that allies of former GOP presidential hopeful Marco Rubio were involved in spreading the smears.
Breitbart News, the notoriously Trump-friendly conservative outlet, was also pitched the story of Cruz’s extramarital affairs, according to a source close to the publication. That source said an operative allied with Marco Rubio—but not associated with his official campaign—showed the publication a compilation video of Cruz and a woman other than his wife coming out of the Capitol Grille restaurant and a hotel on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But the outlet opted not to report on the video, which demonstrated no direct evidence of an affair.
“We got it from a Rubio ally,” said the source. “It was too thin, so [Breitbart’s Washington political editor Matt Boyle] decided not to run it. There was no way to verify the claims.”
The Daily Beast reports many other publications were pitched the same story, but refused to comment on who gave them the information.
Marco, man, not only could you not campaign for shit, you couldn’t even get a news organization to run a smear story.
That is not presidential, my man.
[Via The Daily Beast]