A decade after he began using a Republican Party credit card for personal purchases like paving stones at his home, Senator Marco Rubio on Wednesday pledged to disclose new spending records from that account as he sought to inoculate himself against what could be his biggest liability as a presidential candidate: how he manages his finances.
The decision to release the records highlights the enduring potency of a controversy rooted in Mr. Rubio’s days as a young state representative in Florida that he and his aides thought had been put to rest with his 2010 election to the Senate.
His use of the card for a family reunion, flights and groceries was a recurring issue in that campaign.
But as his presidential campaign experiences a surge in the polls, Mr. Rubio’s rivals are rushing to resurrect the matter in an attempt to portray him as a careless manager of money, despite Mr. Rubio’s assurances that he paid for every personal purchase himself.
A “super PAC” supporting Hillary Rodham Clinton demanded to know Wednesday why Mr. Rubio was waiting so long to release the records, wondering, “What is he hiding?”
Fearing that Mr. Rubio could surpass him in polls, Donald J. Trump has started to mock Mr. Rubio’s use of the party account, calling him “a disaster with his credit cards” and suggesting that the senator struggled to live within his means. “He has a very bad record of finances,” Mr. Trump said.
Jeb Bush all but encouraged the news media to pursue the issue Wednesday, highlighting his own voluminous financial disclosures and suggesting that scrutiny of Mr. Rubio’s handling of money was entirely reasonable.
The risk for Mr. Rubio, who has acknowledged “a lack of bookkeeping skills,” is that the credit card may become a symbol of a larger pattern of financial challenges in his recent past, including a brush with foreclosure on a second home in 2010 over late mortgage payments and the recent liquidation of a retirement account that prompted a large tax penalty.
Mr. Rubio on Wednesday played down the importance of the credit card and fended off questions about his finances, portraying himself as an everyday American who can relate to the struggles of the electorate.
“I obviously don’t come from a wealthy family,” he said in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
Mr. Rubio, 44, has long argued that the credit card arrangement appears worse than it actually was. He used his Republican card, he said, largely for political expenses, which were covered by donations to the party. “But from time to time, a few personal expenses were charged to the card as well,” he wrote in his memoir, “An American Son.”
Every time, he said, he identified the personal purchases and ultimately paid for them himself. He wrote a monthly check to the credit card company to cover the personal costs, and the party wrote a check to cover the political ones, according to his staff.
“Nevertheless, in hindsight,” Mr. Rubio wrote of the personal expenses, “I wish that none of them had ever been charged.”
Even so, during his 2010 Senate campaign Mr. Rubio refused to release the full records of his charges on the card, issued by American Express, calling it an “internal party matter.”
That, according to Florida political observers, was a squandered chance to put the issue behind him.
“The interest is alive and well, because the issue was never resolved,” Peter Butzin, the chairman of Common Cause of Florida, a nonpartisan government watchdog, said Wednesday in an interview. “It never really came to a conclusion. It raised a lot of eyebrows at the time. I’m not surprised it is coming up again.”
Mr. Butzin called the renewed scrutiny of Mr. Rubio’s credit card use “fair game.”
Questions about personal finances have bedeviled several candidates in the 2016 presidential field, highlighting their vast differences in wealth — and in how they earned that income. Mr. Bush has raised eyebrows by earning millions from companies that did business with the State of Florida while he was governor. Mrs. Clinton has unsettled liberals by taking generous speaking fees from big banks that she would regulate if she became president. And Mr. Trump has drawn unwanted attention for relying on bankruptcy protections when his investments in casinos have faltered.
Mr. Rubio has at times seemed defensive about his finances. During the last Republican presidential debate, he batted away a question about his financial bookkeeping as a litany of “discredited attacks from Democrats and my political opponents.”
But on Wednesday, his tone seemed to shift during the ABC interview.
Pressed on the credit card issue, Mr. Rubio spoke in detail about when he used it and how he identified costs that were personal or political.
“If there was a personal expense, I paid it. If it was a party expense, the party paid it,” Mr. Rubio said.
He added, “But the Republican Party never paid a single expense of mine — personal expense.”
To clear the air, Mr. Rubio said he would release new records “in the next few weeks.”
A top Rubio campaign aide said, “Our plan has always been to release these.”
“Marco is running for president and thinks the public has a right to know,” the aide, Todd Harris, said Wednesday in an interview. “And we have nothing to hide.”
The senator is expected to disclose charges on the card in 2005 to 2006. Records covering late 2006 to 2008 became public through leaks to the news media during his Senate campaign — a time when Florida’s Republican Party was facing questions about its financial oversight. Mr. Rubio has said that he charged more than $16,000 in personal expenses on the card in 2007 and 2008. He has not divulged his total spending on the card.
In the ABC interview, Mr. Rubio said the card was not a credit card, as many have referred to it, in the past and more recently.
“It was an American Express charge card secured under my personal credit in conjunction with the party,” Mr. Rubio said.
But this appears to be a change in language by Mr. Rubio. In his memoir, Mr. Rubio described the card as an “American Express business credit card.”
(Mr. Harris said that in the book, Mr. Rubio had simply adopted a colloquial description of the card, but said it was, in fact, a charge card.)
On Wednesday, Mr. Rubio described how he would check for personal expenses on the card, which he said he would pay for himself, without suggesting that such purchases were accidents. In his memoir, Mr. Rubio twice referred to such charges as mistakes.
In one, he said, “I pulled the wrong card from my wallet to pay for pavers.” In another, he said, his travel agent “mistakenly used the card to pay for a family reunion in Georgia.”
Mr. Rubio seems determined to confront the questions about his finances with aplomb, chuckling at the critique from Mr. Trump, for example, and explaining his decision to cash out a retirement account in folksy language that any warm-weather voter would appreciate.
Mr. Rubio said that among other things, he wanted the money to guard against unexpected breakdowns in essential appliances like air-conditioners.
“That’s a crisis in South Florida,” he said.
Jonathan Martin and Jeremy W. Peters contributed reporting.
Marco Rubio Confronts New Scrutiny Over Use of Party Credit Card
The New York Times November 4, 2015
