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Sen. Marco Rubio's rise in the polls is drawing fresh scrutiny of credit card spending while serving in the Florida state House and a recent cashing-in of a retirement account. The Tampa Bay Times reports Wednesday details about the lawmaker's spending while a state House member, which included repairs for his family minivan, first came up in his race for the U.S. Senate in 2010. But they've been dogging him most recently in his surging GOP presidential run, including at the third Republican debate in Colorado last week when he deflected questions about his finances, the Tampa Bay Times reports....

Under fire from various corners about his use of a Florida Republican Party credit card years ago, Senator Marco Rubio said Wednesday that he will "soon" release additional records that will detail those expenditures, brushing aside continued criticism about his personal finances. Mr. Rubio spoke in an appearance on ABC's "Good Morning America," after The Tampa Bay Times reported that he mingled personal expenses with his official uses of the card. Mr. Rubio's top adviser, Todd Harris, told the Florida newspaper that the campaign will release detailed expenditure lists in the coming weeks. He was not more specific than that....

Marco Rubio's routine use of a Republican Party of Florida credit card for personal expenses while speaker of the Florida House brought renewed calls Thursday for the party to disclose charges racked up by former and current elected officials. Rubio, who is battling Florida Gov. Charlie Crist for the party's U.S. Senate nomination, says he repaid all personal expenses to American Express in 2007 and 2008, amounting to $16,052. The party picked up the rest of the $93,566 charges on Rubio's card, including nearly $4,000 in costs to repair his family minivan and rent a car for five weeks. Rubio...

Marco Rubio on Wednesday defended his use of a GOP American Express card -- noting on Good Morning American that it's not a "credit card" -- and said that his campaign would release his statements soon. While he has long refused to release two years of reports, Rubio asserted there was no secrecy. "Every expense on that card is detailed in the Republican Party accounts ... with the reports that they have to file with the state," he said. "It doesn't say who they belong to, but every expense is on there, and as we've said, we'll release those reports...

It has become legend in Florida political circles Marco Rubio's financial story: two years of credit card transactions from his time in the state House, when he and other Republican leaders freely spent party money. Details about the spending, which included repairs for Rubio's family minivan, emerged in his 2010 U.S. Senate race. But voters got only half the story because the candidate refused to disclose additional records. Now Sen. Rubio's past is under fresh scrutiny as he emerges as a top presidential prospect. During last week's debate, he deflected questions about his financial discipline - most recently, he liquidated...

As Marco Rubio rises in the polls, his financial past is coming back to haunt him - namely two years of credit card transactions from his time as speaker of the Florida House, the details of which remain a mystery. During the GOP presidential hopeful's 2010 Senate race, the Tampa Bay Times and the Miami Herald obtained his 2006 and 2007 credit card statements, which allegedly showed that he regularly charged personal expenses - including a four-day, $10,000 family reunion and repairs to his family minivan, according to the Times. The investigation also found he failed to disclose $34,000 in...

Near the statue of Daniel Webster below the gold-domed Capitol in Concord, N.H., Donald Trump showed up today to file his paperwork to be on the ballot of the country's first-in-the-nation primary. He wasted no time ripping into Marco Rubio over his use of Florida GOP credit cards for personal use while a leader in the Florida Legislature. "Marco Rubio has a disaster on his finances, he has a disaster on his credit cards. When you check his credit cards take a look at what he has done with the Republican Party when he had access, what he had to...

It has become legend in Florida political circles, a missing chapter in Marco Rubio's convoluted financial story: two years of credit card transactions from his time in the state House, when he and other Republican leaders freely spent party money. Details about the spending, which included repairs for Rubio's family minivan, emerged in his 2010 U.S. Senate race. But voters got only half the story because the candidate refused to disclose additional records. Now Sen. Rubio's past is under fresh scrutiny as he emerges as a top presidential prospect. During last week's debate he deflected questions about his financial discipline...

Republican presidential candidates Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio are butting heads over Rubio's Senate attendance record. The tensions between the two Floridians boiled over at last Wednesday's GOP debate, when Bush said Rubio should either be present for his Senate votes or simply resign. Rubio came away from the controversy largely unscathed, and Bush's self-admitted subpar debate performance has caused some to openly wonder if his campaign has staying power. Flash back to just five years ago, when Rubio was first elected to Congress, and Bush introduced the senator-elect with praise and admiration that he has, for obvious reasons, not...

One of the wealthiest and most influential Republican donors in the country is throwing his support to Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a decision that could swing millions of dollars in contributions behind Mr. Rubio at a critical point in the Republican nominating battle. The decision by the donor, Paul Singer, a billionaire New York investor, is a signal victory for Mr. Rubio in his battle with his rival Jeb Bush for the affections of major Republican patrons and the party's business wing. -snip- Last week, Mr. Bush's campaign manager, Danny Diaz, and senior adviser, Sally Bradshaw, flew to New...

Jeb Bush says he didn't see the 112-page memo from his presidential campaign detailing why rival Marco Rubio is a "risky bet" for the Republican Party before it leaked. "I didn't see it," Bush said in an interview aired Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." "Well, I read about it when it was leaked for sure. I didn't know about the PowerPoint." The former Republican governor from Florida said that detailing his differences with other candidates is part of a campaign, but stressed he wants his staff to focus on winning the early presidential caucus and primary states and bringing...

<p>Paul Singer, the billionaire super PAC moneyman, likes Marco Rubio just fine — but he’s not quite ready to crack his seven-figure checkbook for a shoestring Rubio campaign run out of a tatty Capitol Hill row house.</p> <p>Like just about every Republican these days, Singer — who accrued a $2 billion fortune through a famously cautious investment strategy — is wondering if the ascendant 44-year-old Florida senator can really create a big-time national campaign, said two people familiar with the hedge fund manager’s thinking.</p>

For all the buzz surrounding his campaign, the Florida senator isn't raising enough money and hasn't yet built much of a field organization. The hype surrounding Marco Rubio's presidential campaign just smashed into the wall of reality. First, the Florida senator's team insisted it had stashed more campaign cash in the bank than fellow Floridian Jeb Bush -- only it hadn't. The campaign also told reporters it had raised $6 million in the last fundraising quarter -- also not true. That turned out to be an overly generous rounding of the underwhelming real figure: $5.7 million. Yet those aren't even...

Sheldon Adelson, one of the Republican Party's most sought-after contributors, is leaning increasingly toward supporting Marco Rubio — and the Florida senator is racing to win the backing of other uncommitted megadonors who have the potential to direct tens of millions of dollars his way and alter the contours of the Republican primary fight.

Businessman Donald Trump on Tuesday targeted Republican presidential rival Marco Rubio, suggesting the Florida senator is a "perfect little puppet" to donors. Trump alluded to a report this week that casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, a top Republican mega-donor, was leaning toward supporting Rubio's 2016 bid. "Sheldon Adelson is looking to give big dollars to Rubio because he feels he can mold him into his perfect little puppet. I agree!" Trump tweeted. Trump labeled Rubio and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, another GOP candidate, as "puppets" during a bipartisan convention in New Hampshire on Monday.

Marco Rubio didn't want to be on the nation's political radar. Not this early in the presidential race. Not with so much time left for rivals to take aim at the big target on his back. -snip- His campaign announced disappointing fundraising numbers Thursday to top political donors gathered at the Bellagio Hotel on the Vegas Strip. Rubio collected about $6 million over the three months that ended Sept. 30 -- far less than competitors Ben Carson ($20 million) and Ted Cruz ($12 million), the only two other candidates in the field who have made their fundraising totals public so...

Voters are beginning to learn about Republican presidential hopeful Marco Rubio. What they're not learning, however, is who is paying to promote his candidacy. The Florida senator is benefiting in unprecedented ways from a nonprofit group funded by anonymous donors. While other presidential candidates also have ties to secret-money groups, the Rubio arrangement is the boldest. Every pro-Rubio television commercial so far in the early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina has been paid for not by his campaign or even by a super PAC that identifies its donors, but instead by a nonprofit called Conservative Solutions...

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) has declared in a little-noticed TV interview that the United States should go to war against Russia, merely to block a flood of Muslim immigrants that can otherwise be stopped by a few European border guards. Rubio wants to create a “No Fly” zone over Syria to prevent the Syrian air force from bombing rebel and civilian targets. Any Russian sortie into the no-fly-zone would be “no different than any other adversary,” Rubio said Oct. 5 in a CNBC interview. His urge to shoot down Russian aircraft is a sharp break in the nation’s national security...

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz's presidential campaign raised $12.2 million in the third quarter of this year, eclipsing the roughly $6 million that his GOP rival Sen. Marco Rubio brought in, campaign officials confirmed to CBS News. Rubio only managed to raise about half of the $12 million he raised in the second quarter. However, the Florida senator entered the month of October with about $11 million in cash on hand. Cruz's campaign did not reveal how much they had on hand. Rubio campaign officials said July and August were tough months for donations. Rubio's fundraising pales in comparison to Cruz's...

For months, Marco Rubio has run a low-key campaign, designed to keep a slow and steady pace. The past two weeks explain why. RIding a post-debate high in the polls, the newly threatening Rubio suddenly became a 2016 pin cushion, pierced by friends (Jeb Bush), rivals (Donald Trump) and strangers (Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig) alike. On Thursday evening, the ascendant Florida senator got whacked again as news of his surprisingly anemic quarterly fundraising went public -- he raised just $6 million between the end of June and the end of September, hardly the haul of a candidate with a bead...