WASHINGTON — Sen. Marco Rubio again on Sunday denied reports that he had anything to do with a recent secret meeting between President Trump and two former presidents of Colombia at the president’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
"No, no," said Rubio, R-Fla., a member of both the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Intelligence Committee, when asked on Sunday’s “Meet The Press” if he had any role in setting up the meeting. “You’ll have to ask the White House whether there even was a meeting and what happened and you’ll have to ask the former presidents.”
A report in the Miami Herald last week claimed that Trump met with former Colombian Presidents Álvaro Uribe and Andrés Pastrana, who are both against the controversial peace deal between the current Colombian government and rebel group, FARC.
Colombian news media reported that Rubio helped arrange the meeting, which he denies.
“By the way,” Rubio continued, “former president Uribe is now a sitting senator in Columbia, and I’m a sitting senator in the United States — I’ve met with foreign heads of state in my travels abroad so I’m not sure what the big deal is in that regard. But that said, you’ll have to ask them. I didn’t even know they were in Florida.”
The White House claims the meeting was by chance and they deny that there was any discussion of a peace deal.
A senior administration official told NBC News that the former presidents were invited to the resort by a member of the club and that the president bumped into them but that there was no official meeting.
The official claimed their exchange only lasted a couple of minutes and that they shook hands and moved along.
