Speaking to an enthusiastic crowd of several thousand supporters at a campaign rally in Jacksonville, Florida on Saturday, GOP frontrunner Donald Trump blasted former Florida Governor Jeb Bush for doing a poor job managing his own campaign’s finances.
“Then, he’s got a finance director,” Trump said of Bush, “Listen to this one, a finance director for a political campaign where he’s losing badly and embarrassing his family. He’s got a finance director who got paid already $1.3 million. Can you believe that?” Trump said.
He continued to mock Bush’s business judgment in typical Trump style.
“I mean, I have good people. My people are better than his. I pay them peanuts,” Trump said.
“Corey, you’re getting paid peanuts,” he said, pointing to Corey Lewandowski, his campaign manager.
“I don’t pay like that. I can’t. I can’t mentally,” Trump added.
You can watch the entire speech here. The reference to the campaign’s finance director comes at the 48:42 mark.
After the speech, late Saturday, Trump sent out two tweets critical of Bush:
@JebBush is totally lost — he spends too much time managing the bloated staff of his campaign & not enough talking about America’s future.
@JebBush is slashing campaign salaries, people making millions. If he can’t manage his campaign, how can he manage our countries finances?
Breitbart News broke the story late Friday night that Bush campaign finance director Heather Larrison may have made $1.3 million off of the Bush campaign.
As Breitbart News reported:
A senior finance staffer for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s campaign, who also runs a firm that has received payments from the pro-Bush Super PAC Right to Rise USA, may have been paid more than a million dollars so far in 2015, either directly or through companies she owns or has an ownership interest in, off of Jeb’s effort to become the third member of the Bush family elected president of the United States. . .
Total combined payments to Heather Larrison, the Larrison Group, and LKJ LLC during 2015 from the Jeb Bush campaign and the Right to Rise USA SuperPac are more than $1.3 million.
On Saturday, Brietbart News reported that Larrison spent last week trying to reassure skittish Bush donors that the campaign’s finances were in good order.
The Bush campaign did not respond to any of the requests for comment made to them by Breitbart News prior to the running of either story.
Earlier in his Jacksonville speech, Trump mocked the ineptness of Bush’s campaign mercilessly. Here’s a partial transcript of those comments:
So Bush has no money. He’s cutting. He’s meeting today with mommy and daddy. And they’re working on their campaign.
They’re working. And in all fairness, he wants to stay in.
But, I have some numbers.
He’s cutting everybody 40 percent across the board. And everybody’s agreeing to it.
So, me as a businessman…we have a lot of business people here… me as a businessman, said ‘well, if he’s cutting everybody 40 percent, and every single person has agreed to it, why didn’t he make that deal in the first place?
Right? Does that make sense?
In other words, if he’s going to cut 40 percent, you make the deal in the first place. You don’t wait till your failing.
So, he’s failing.
Trump is scheduled to appear on Jake Tapper’s CNN show Sunday. Bush is in Houston this weekend, meeting with family and supporters to determine the revised direction of his campaign.
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