Ben Carson is not a happy camper this morning and he was not quiet about why he felt he got screwed over by Ted Cruz. He questioned Ted Cruz' campaign for cheating and using "dirty tricks," against him by telling voters he had suspended his campaign.
He went on Fox and Friends this morning and demanded Cruz fire people or rectify the situation:
“If Ted Cruz doesn’t know about this, then he clearly needs to very quickly get rid of some people in his organization,” Carson told “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday. “And if he does know about it, isn’t this the exact kind of thing that the American people are tired of? Why would we want to continue that kind of, you know, shenanigans?”
Cruz won the Iowa caucuses Monday with 28 percent support. Carson finished fourth at 9 percent but blamed his fourth-place finish on Cruz’s campaign for allegedly telling caucus-goers that Carson was dropping out. “I got calls from several people who told me their internal intelligence said that I was going to do extraordinarily well,” Carson said in the phone interview to Fox News.
“At many of the precincts, information was disseminated that I was suspending my campaign, that I had dropped out, and anybody who was planning to vote for me was wasting their vote and, therefore, they should reconsider,” said Carson, who added that his camp also saw similar messaging via tweets and written correspondence.
“Like I said, if he didn’t know about this, he needs to get rid of the people who are responsible for that,” he said. “I mean, that would be a high priority for me. And if he did know about it, he needs to come out, admit what he did and try to offer a solution.
Those are really harsh words coming from the usually very sedate Carson.
Ted Cruz' campaign dismissed these allegation on MSNBC's Morning Joe:
“We simply as a campaign repeated what Ben Carson had said in his own words. He said after Iowa he was going to go to back to Florida for a couple days and then he was going to go to D.C. to the prayer breakfast,”
Cruz campaign communications director Rick Tyler told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “And what that told us was he was not going to New Hampshire. That’s not a dirty trick. That was really surprising by a campaign who was once leading in Iowa that is saying he’s not going to come to New Hampshire. I mean, that’s a news item.”
Sure, we believe that, Rick.
Iowa Rep. Steve King, an avid Cruz supporter tweeted this out to further sandbag Carson's operation.
#iacaucus Skipping NH & SC is the equivalent of suspending. Too bad this information won't get to all caucus goers. https://t.co/lW5Js50EMA
— Steve King (@SteveKingIA) February 2, 2016
Carson looks like he is out. Iowans need to know before they vote. Most will go to Cruz, I hope. https://t.co/lW5Js50EMA
— Steve King (@SteveKingIA) February 2, 2016
UPDATE: Ted Cruz has now issued an apology to Ben Carson in a statement:
The day after winning the Iowa caucuses, Ted Cruz issued an apology to Republican rival Ben Carson for falsely telling Iowa caucusgoers that the retired neurosurgeon planned to quit the race, calling it a "mistake."Cruz said in a statement Tuesday that his campaign staff saw a CNN report that Carson was dropping out, although CNN had not characterized Carson's actions that way.
"Last night when our political team saw the CNN post saying that Dr. Carson was not carrying on to New Hampshire and South Carolina, our campaign updated grassroots leaders just as we would with any breaking news story," Cruz said in a statement first shared with CNN.
"That's fair game. What the team then should have done was send around the follow-up statement from the Carson campaign clarifying that he was indeed staying in the race when that came out."
I doubt Cruz just saying "sorry," will cut it for the Carson camp. The damage is already done.
