Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio had planned to attend a fundraiser last night at the home of real estate heir Harlan Crow, who owns paintings by Adolf Hitler.
Last night was the eve of the Jewish high holiday of Yom Kippur. Holding the $2,000-per-couple event on such a day “seems sloppy even for the most amateur of campaigns,” writes Sophia Tesfaye at Salon.
Rubio’s intended host also owns a signed copy of Mein Kampf, reports the Texas Tribune.
“An event at a home with items like these is appalling at any time of the year,” said Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz in a press statement. “Holding an event in a house featuring the artwork and signed autobiography of a man who dedicated his life to extinguishing the Jewish people is the height of insensitivity and indifference.”
Republican National Committee spokeswoman Allison Moore shot back that Rubio’s opponents are looking to “manufacture a false controversy over a collection of historic memorabilia that includes a statue of Margaret Thatcher and effects belonging to Abraham Lincoln.”
Crow also owns sculptures of Joseph Stalin and Mao-tse Tung, according to the Dallas Morning News.
The Rubio campaign did not immediately respond to a request for information.
Rubio’s performance in the second Republican debate has given him a bump in one Florida poll, reports Florida’s SunSentinel; he’s second only to Donald Trump, and ahead of former Florida Governor Jeb Bush in a Florida Atlantic University survey due out today.
Crow’s father was real estate magnate Trammell Crow, whose firm was picked up by CB Richard Ellis Group in 2006 for $2.2 billion, according to Forbes; the publication points out that Crow is close buds with Supreme Court Justice and accused sexual harasser Clarence Thomas.
The Dallas Morning News visited Crow’s home in 2014 and found works by Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir alongside those of political leaders like Winston Churchill and Dwight D. Eisenhower, as well as der Führer. His sculpture garden houses portraits of dictators Nicolae Ceausescu, Vladimir Lenin, and Joseph Stalin, in addition to renditions of Churchill and Thatcher.