“If Ted Cruz doesn’t know about this, then he clearly needs to very quickly get rid of some people in his organization,” Carson said. Cruz campaign apologizes to Carson

Ted Cruz’s campaign on Tuesday apologized to Ben Carson for telling Iowans ahead of the caucuses that the retired neurosurgeon had suspended his campaign.

“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’s campaign said in a statement. “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. This was a mistake from our end, and for that I apologize to Dr. Carson.”


Carson had called on Cruz to fire anybody on his campaign involved in spreading the misinformation, which he maintained was announced at caucus precincts and in written correspondence.



"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 morning. “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 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,” Carson said. Even his wife, Candy, who was scheduled to speak at a precinct, was approached by a Cruz surrogate passing out the false information, Carson said, reiterating that people should be fired.



“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.”



Cruz’s campaign initially dismissed the allegations Tuesday. “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.”



Jason Osborne, Carson’s deputy communications director, said Carson had left for Florida to get fresh clothes and would be there for less than a day. He called the Cruz camp’s strategy part of a D.C. pattern that disgusts people. “We’re not saying that we would have won, but what we’re saying is that this is not the way politics should be,” he told MSNBC later Tuesday. “And I think the Iowans out there that were going to vote for us should be upset. I think Marco Rubio and Donald Trump should be upset because who knows how their numbers would have been affected.”



“All we can say is that Dr. Carson is committed to his campaign, and he’s going to continue on,” Osborne added. “And he’s got a higher resolve now to get out there and spread his message.”