Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) speaks to crowd during a campaign rally at Ottawa Farms December 19, 2015 in Bloomingdale, Georgia. (Photo by Nicholas Pilch/Getty Images) (2015 Getty Images)
It was an oversight. No big deal. Let’s move on.
That’s the response from presidential candidate Ted Cruz and his campaign staff to a New York Times report Wednesday that in 2012 the Texas lawmaker failed to note that he’d received a low-interest loan for about $500,000 from the investment bank Goldman Sachs – his wife’s employer – during his Senate run.
Cruz, who has railed against the influence of big banks and Wall Street on Washington D.C., dismissed the issue as “an inadvertent filing question.”
“Those loans have been disclosed over and over and over again on multiple filings,” he said at a press conference, according to Politico. “If it was the case that they were not filed exactly as the FEC requires, then we’ll amend the filings. But all of the information has been public and transparent for many years. And that’s the end of that.”
The Times reported that Cruz and his wife, Heidi, had made a point of expressing pride in media interviews about how they had sacrificed all their savings and other assets for the Senate campaign.
The Times, which said it had reviewed Cruz’s Senate campaign finance records, noted that the loan should have been reported in those documents but was not.
“The couple’s decision to pump more than $1 million into Mr. Cruz’s successful Tea Party-darling Senate bid in Texas was made easier by a large loan from Goldman Sachs, where Mrs. Cruz works,” the Times said. “That loan was not disclosed in campaign finance reports.”
It added that Cruz “put ‘personal funds’ totaling $960,000 into his Senate campaign. Two months later, shortly before a scheduled runoff election, he added more, bringing the total to $1.2 million — ‘which is all we had saved,’ as Mr. Cruz described it in an interview with The New York Times several years ago.”
Cruz’s campaign spokeswoman, Catherine Frazier, said to reporters after the story appeared that the loan, was in essence, part of his own money because it was taken out “against his own assets.”
If anything was mishandled during the Senate GOP primary in which Cruz was running, it was an oversight, she said.
“So this is his personal money,” Frazier said. “What we have recently found out, what came to our attention is, because he took a loan out against his assets it should have been noted in the FEC report.”
She added that the campaign was trying to find out from the Federal Election Commission if Cruz needs to do anything now to correct the situation.
Cruz and Frazier stressed that the loan was disclosed in plenty of other documents, and that it was not something the lawmaker and his wife were trying to hide.
“This has all been out in the open, it’s simply an issue of semantics,” she said. “This was all of his own personal money.”
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