The 2016 Blast The latest POLITICO scoops and coverage of the 2016 elections. Email Sign Up

Tweets from https://twitter.com/politico/lists/team-politico



Marco Rubio senior adviser Todd Harris said the picture was Photoshopped, saying Rubio doesn’t own the tie or watch he’s shown wearing. | POLITICO Screen grab Rubio adviser bashes ‘dishonesty’ of Cruz camp for Photoshopped Rubio-Obama picture

GREENVILLE, S.C. — Marco Rubio’s campaign bashed the “culture of dishonesty” of Ted Cruz’s campaign for launching a website that uses a doctored picture of the Florida senator shaking President Barack Obama’s hand.

The Cruz campaign website www.therealrubiorecord.com accuses Rubio of supporting “amnesty,” backing a cap-and-trade carbon emissions program, being a “puppet” of Big Sugar, and teaming up with Obama to authorize reaching the Trans-Pacific trade deal. On trade, it shows a picture of Rubio shaking the president’s hand next to the caption, “The Rubio-Obama Trade Pact.”

Rubio senior adviser Todd Harris said Rubio doesn’t own the tie or watch he’s shown wearing. He noted that Rubio did back the trade authority measure last year. Cruz initially voiced support for it before changing his mind and voting no — a flip-flop Rubio once brought up at a debate.

“There is a culture of dishonesty from top to bottom in the Cruz for president campaign,” Harris told reporters after a campaign rally Thursday. “It is reflected in what Ted Cruz himself says, it’s reflected by phony Facebook pages that his supporters put up, it’s reflected by calls to Iowa voters saying Ben Carson dropped out. … And now the latest example is a completely invented photo of Marco Rubio attacking us for a position that Ted Cruz himself held a few short months ago.”

The Cruz campaign, which did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment, later acknowledged it owned the website but suggested that the fake picture wasn’t a big deal.

“Two days before the presidential primary in South Carolina, they want to talk about a picture we used,” Rick Tyler, a Cruz spokesman, told CNN. “If Rubio has a better picture of him shaking hands with Barack Obama, I’m happy to swap it out.”

The underlying image used in the doctored photo --first found by Rubio's wife -- can be uncovered with a simple Internet search using the terms “businessmen shaking hands” or, as Rubio supporters noted, “black man shaking hands.” In addition to superimposing the faces of Rubio and Obama, the Cruz team reversed the photo so the handshake takes place with left hands as a result. Obama is left handed.

Asked how it found the photo, Cruz campaign spokesman Brian Phillips said via email: “We googled ‘two people supporting amnesty.’”

While Cruz’s campaign sees an advantage in getting Rubio to raise the profile of the website by complaining about the doctored photo, Rubio’s campaign pressed the attack so that it can continue describing Cruz as someone who “lies.”

Harris says it’s more evidence of Rubio’s momentum ahead of Saturday’s primary. He’s polling in third place, far behind Donald Trump but close to Cruz, and the Florida lawmaker netted a big endorsement from South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley on Wednesday.

Cruz “is obviously seeing something in his internal polling numbers that is creating a sense of desperation in his campaign,” Harris said.

Harris is intimately familiar with the power of an Obama picture in a GOP primary. When Rubio ran for Senate in 2010, Harris worked for that campaign, which used a real picture of Obama and then-Republican Gov. Charlie Crist embracing. The watershed moment helped chase Crist out of the GOP.

Rubio supporters on Twitter began mocking Cruz with the hashtag “PhotoshopTED” and, later, “CruzPhotoshop” by superimposing Cruz’s and Rubio’s image in other pictures. “Remember that time @marcorubio won American Idol? One of my favorite photos!” Rubio supporter Carolyn Moore said in a tweet that showed a fake Rubio being congratulated onstage by Ryan Seacrest.

Phillips, Cruz’s spokesman, soon tweeted out another photo, this one real, of Rubio shaking Obama’s hand at a State of the Union speech.

“Rubio camp said pic of Rubio shaking hands w Obama ‘inventing an attack.’ http://bit.ly/1LvMUzZ So what’s this-->,” Phillips said via Twitter.

Phillips highlighted his tweet in a follow-up email that said Rubio’s campaign was “embarrassing” itself.

“So,” Phillips wrote, “the candidate who argues he’s the strongest one to stand up to Russia, North Korea, China and ISIS apparently wilts in the face of graphic designers.”