Becky Quick, one of the three CNBC moderators at Wednesday night’s Republican debate, was accused twice by Donald Trump of a crucial quote misattribution.
“You talked a little bit about Marco Rubio,” she noted, after she questioned the Florida senator about his stance on H1B1 visas to allow skilled foreign workers to stay in the U.S. “I think you called him ‘Mark Zuckerberg's personal senator’ because he was in favor of the H1B1 visas—”
“I never said that. I never said that,” Trump interrupted. “I was not at all critical of him.”
“So you’re saying this was an erroneous article all around?” Quick asked, and when Trump continued to talk over her about Rubio (“another gentleman in Florida who happens to be a very nice guy”), she quickly backed down. “My apologies,” Quick said.
“Somebody’s really doing some bad fact-checking,” Trump joked.
But, as the Internet soon found, Trump’s own campaign website, does indeed say (for now) that “Mark Zuckerberg’s personal Senator, Marco Rubio, has a bill to triple H-1Bs that would decimate women and minorities.”
In case that sentence goes down the memory hole, here’s a screencap:
According to CNN, the statement has been in Trump’s platform since August 17th.
After a commercial break, Quick brought up the fact that Trump’s own website indeed had the Zuckerberg quote on it.
