Florida rep’s Senate campaign calls critical story ‘deeply false’

Rep. Patrick Murphy’s Senate campaign on Thursday disputed a report that the Florida congressman had overstated some of his qualifications.

Murphy’s campaign said a CBS Miami story published Wednesday that claimed Murphy has made misleading or false claims about his previous experiences was “deeply false” and “misleading,” the Miami Herald reported.

{mosads}In an email sent to reporters, Murphy’s campaign referenced many parts of the story, which it called “completely inaccurate.” It said “overnight, there were already seven corrections” to the story. The CBS Miami story did not show any corrections, though the Miami Herald reported some of the wording appeared to have been clarified.

“CBS Miami’s sensational claim is completely false,” Murphy’s campaign manager, Josh Wolf, said in a statement.

“While we know dozens of hopeful Republican staffers will be disappointed, CBS Miami’s report shows that Patrick Murphy owned an environmental clean-up company, owned skimming vessels, and had contracts to clean up oil.”

The campaign said it provided 70 pages of corporate records to CBS Miami and submitted more than 2,000 words of answers to questions “in an effort to be as transparent as possible with proprietary corporate records.”

“Almost none of the information we provided is reflected in CBS Miami’s deeply inaccurate reporting, which invents a story about Patrick’s life that is unrecognizable to anyone who knows him,” Wolf said.

The CBS Miami story said Murphy had repeatedly made false claims about working as a certified public accountant and as a small-business owner. Although Murphy’s campaign disputed the claims, it said the “material will surely appear in Republican attack ads.”