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Rubio unloads on Turkish chef for ‘feasting’ Venezuela’s Maduro: ‘I got pissed’

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said Tuesday he was “pissed” when he learned that the celebrity chef known as Salt Bae had hosted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro at one of his restaurants in Turkey.

Rubio slammed the Turkish chef, whose real name is Nusret Gökçe, after Maduro was seen “eating a five-star gourmet meal, smoking fine cigars while the people of Venezuela are literally starving.”

“It’s an outrage, disgusting … this is a man starving human beings and [Salt Bae] is celebrating him as some sort of hero – I got pissed,” Rubio told reporters on Tuesday.

Rubio, an outspoken critic of Maduro who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, went after the chef on Monday and called him a “weirdo” on Twitter after Gökçe posted a video with Maduro at his restaurant in Istanbul.

“I don’t know who this weirdo #Saltbae is, but the guy he is so proud to host is not the President of #Venezuela. He is actually the overweight dictator of a nation where 30% of the people eat only once a day & infants are suffering from malnutrition,” Rubio tweeted.

Rubio noted in a follow-up tweet that The Miami Herald downloaded a copy of the video before it disappeared from Gökçe’s accounts on Twitter and Instagram, where he has more than 15 million followers. The Florida Republican also noted that Gökçe owns a steakhouse in Miami and provided the restaurant’s number for followers to call. 

“All I gave was the phone number – this isn’t a political disagreement … [Maduro] is a criminal,” Rubio told reporters on Tuesday.

“On top of the crimes he’s committing against his own people, by starving them and denying aid from entering the country, he’s also complicit and actively involved in making money off trafficking of cocaine and drugs into the U.S.”

–– Molly Hooper

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