Florida Senate showdown: Rubio takes aim at former police chief Demings over crime

EXCLUSIVE – Rep. Val Deming’s three decades in law enforcement are not preventing GOP Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida from criticizing his likely 2022 Democratic challenger over the issue of crime.

Rubio — at a campaign event where he landed the endorsement of sheriffs from 55 of Florida’s 67 counties, and in an exclusive interview with Fox News on Monday — took aim at the Democratic representative, who rose through the ranks to become Orlando’s first female police chief, calling Deming’s past criticism of law enforcement “especially sickening.”

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Sheriff Wayne Ivey of Brevard County, speaking at the campaign event in Jacksonville, emphasized that the sheriffs were backing Rubio’s re-election bid because “he has always stood with us, our deputies, and our profession. 

“The other candidate in this race, however, Val Demings, turned her back on her profession as she stood with the soft on crime crowd in Washington D.C., and in doing so put our citizens and our law enforcement officers at risk,” Ivey charged.

Coming in front of the microphones a few minutes later, Rubio once again described Demings, the clear front-runner in Florida’s August Democratic primary, as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s “hand-picked candidate for Senate.”

Demings “should know better,” he said. 

“It’s even worse when someone who knows better and should know better decides to align themselves with this effort to call into question the work that law enforcement is doing,” he added, pointing to “the way she has voted for not deporting criminal aliens that are in this country.”

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“There are plenty of people around this country that would…