During Saturday night’s GOP debate slugfest, Donald Trump accused Ted Cruz and his campaign of making deceptive robocalls in South Carolina. According to Trump, automated messages from the Cruz campaign were telling voters, “Donald Trump is not going to run in South Carolina.” The Cruz campaign’s response to the allegation is unequivocable. “FALSE. Period,” rapid response director Brian Phillips told CBS News Friday.

According to The Washington Post, residents in South Carolina are getting calls said to be from Remington Research. The calls pretend to be a neutral poll asking voters who they support in the GOP race, but quickly turn negative if respondents answer favorably about Trump or Marco Rubio.

Westminster school teacher Natalie Barrett said the call she received hit Rubio for his Gang of Eight “amnesty” and Trump for his affection for eminent domain. She said she found the call “negative” and “unfair.” Adding to the suspicion it’s a Cruz operation, The Post notes Remington Research was “created by Cruz’s campaign manager Jeff Roe.”

But according to the Cruz campaign’s director of research, Chris Wilson, “We’re not doing any robo-polls in South Carolina.” He reiterated that they aren’t making those calls and said, “Anyone can make those calls as Remington Research to screw with reporters and make Jeff look like he’s doing something.”

Trump first brought up issue on Thursday.

We are getting reports from many voters that the Cruz people are back to doing very sleazy and dishonest "pushpolls" on me. We are watching!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 11, 2016

Characteristically, he followed with a bit of his own sleaze.

How can Ted Cruz be an Evangelical Christian when he lies so much and is so dishonest?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 12, 2016

Titus Bond, Director of the Remington Research Group, also denied involvement. “We aren’t doing any robo polls in South Carolina, period,” Bond told CBS News, “Anyone suggesting otherwise is outright lying.”

The accusations and denials are just part of political business in South Carolina, says The Washington Post:

This, in a nutshell, is South Carolina a week before the highly contested Republican primary: a cloudy tincture of desperation, paranoia and umbrage, with plausible deniability for everyone. It’s a mad scramble to make every other candidate look bad, either by playing dirty or accusing an opponent of playing dirty.

Trump’s accusation against Cruz doesn’t come in a vacuum. “It’s the same thing he did to Ben Carson,” Trump said Saturday night. During the Iowa caucuses the Cruz campaign made hay of CNN reports suggesting Carson was dropping out of the campaign. They instructed campaign workers to tell voters Carson looked to be suspending his campaign. Cruz would apologize for his campaign not quickly spreading word when it became clear the report was false. But Michael Brown argues that it’s CNN who needs to apologize.

Yes, CNN’s Chris Moody had quickly issued a second tweet correcting the Carson report, but other CNN outlets, with far, far greater audience, reach continued to suggest that Carson appeared to be suspending his campaign. In neither CNN’s own much-larger Twitter feed nor during their caucus-night coverage, with its still greater audience reach, did the network mention Moody’s second tweet — not until the election was decided. Instead, the CNN anchors speculated on the “very unusual” and “very significant” news that Carson was heading home from Iowa, rather than traveling on to New Hampshire, and wasn’t at all behaving like a candidate intending to stay in the race.

The South Carolina primary takes place Saturday.