Ted Cruz has built his career on being a man of the people, catapulting to the U.S. Senate in 2012 on the strength of a grassroots Tea Party-backed campaign, funded in large part by liquidating his own assets.
According to the New York Times, however, that’s not the whole story. In reality, Cruz got a large loan from Goldman Sachs at the time, which is his wife’s place of employment. He also got a loan from Citibank in the weeks before the critical Republican primary for Texas’s open Senate seat. All that money together? It totaled one million dollars.
Yet Cruz failed to disclose the Goldman Sachs loan to election officials. Instead, the loan turned up in personal finance filings that Cruz later made with the Senate. The senator’s spokeswoman says this oversight was “inadvertent,” and would be corrected. She did not, however, address the Citibank loan.
The loans allowed Cruz to run key television ads which let him to defeat his heavily favored opponent, David Dewhurst, the Lt. Governor of Texas at the time.
This flies in the face of Cruz’s narrative that his wife–in a strong marital show of faith–agreed to liquidate their personal assets in order to fund the senator’s campaign. The New York Times quotes Cruz as saying, “What astonished me, then and now, was Heidi within 60 seconds said, ‘Absolutely,’ with no hesitation.”
Unfortunately, that soundbite seems to have been at least somewhat inaccurate. It also calls into question whether the senator can truly call himself a populist. Whether this hurts Cruz’s chance at the Republican nomination for President remains to be seen.
(via New York Times)