Watch: GOP Candidate's Spokesman BERATES CNN On Live TV- 'Utter Nonsense...'

CNN broke a story claiming that members of Fla. Senator Marco Rubio’s own team were urging him to quit the race ahead of the Fla. primary to avoid an embarrassing blowout loss to Donald Trump. Later that day, however, a Rubio spokesman appeared on CNN and thoroughly slammed CNN for spreading the false story.

The story published by CNN on Monday, March 7, insisted “a battle is being waged” inside Rubio’s campaign with some advisers telling the young senator to get out of the race before the Fla. primary or risk hurting his career should GOP front runner Donald Trump beat Rubio in his own home state.

As Floridians prepare to go to the polls on March 15 to pick their primary winner, many are saying if Rubio loses his own home state to Trump or Sen. Cruz it will damage his career going forward.

The cable news network played the story in heavy rotation all day on Monday and it wasn’t long before Rubio spokesman Alex Conant appeared on the air with CNN host Wolf Blitzer to address the claims. Conant, though, slammed the network for promulgating what he claimed was a “fictitious” story.

Saying the story was “100 percent, absolutely false,” Conant criticized CNN for the story. “This is fiction,” he said.

“I think CNN is doing a disservice to voters by airing that sort of reporting without even checking with the campaign,” Conant continued. “Your sources–what ever they are–have no idea what the internal deliberations of the campaign are because if she (the writer of the original piece) did she’d know that Marco feels confident about Florida.”

“I was sitting in a senior staff meeting planning out next week’s schedule when I saw this report suddenly air and I came racing across town to correct it,” the Rubio operative added.

Conant further slammed CNN saying, “Because CNN hadn’t asked us for comment before that. I mean, CNN went to air with a report without asking the campaign for feedback, who does that? How did that happen? How’d that get to air without someone asking the campaign for comment?”

The Rubio spokesman closed saying no one at CNN contacted any Rubio staffers or any of the top campaign operatives before airing its claim that “insiders” were telling Rubio to quit the race.

Still, despite the criticism from the Rubio campaign, CNN is standing by its report.

h/t: Independent Journal.

Facebook has greatly reduced the distribution of our stories in our readers' newsfeeds and is instead promoting mainstream media sources. When you share to your friends, however, you greatly help distribute our content. Please take a moment and consider sharing this article with your friends and family. Thank you.