Senator Ted Cruz may be a GOP whackjob who thrives on disinformation-fueled chaos and crappy haircuts that give off human-skunk vibes, but he’s also an author, and, like most writers these days, he knows how hard it can be to get people to buy your damn book.
So, he did it himself.
A new report from Forbes just landed, detailing how Cruz’s team used campaign funds to buy copies of his book from retail publishers late last year. The book in question is One Vote Away: How a Single Supreme Court Seat Can Change History, a title that dropped in September of 2020. According to financial records disclosed by Cruz on Monday, the Texas lawmaker shelled out $153,000 to buy copies of his latest political work from retailer Books-a-Million. Is it sad that a sitting senator had to buy that many copies of his own book in order to get it on the bestseller lists? Sure, but it’s not the public humiliation that we’ve seen most from Cancun’s “Dad-Of-The-Year.”
Apparently, Cruz used his own campaign funds to buy his book and to advertise it on social media sites like Facebook, which might violate ethics standards. The Federal Elections Commission allows members to use campaign funds to buy books, as long as they don’t receive royalties in the process. If they do, those royalties are supposed to be donated to charity. Cruz’s team denies receiving any royalties from sales of his books, but they won’t clarify which books they bought using campaign money, making the whole fact-checking process a bit difficult. But, even if we take Cruz’s word for it on the book-buying front, the fact that he used campaign funds to pay for social media advertisements is what’s really troubling. A government watchdog organization recently filed complaints with the FEC and the Senate Ethics Committee after news broke that Cruz had paid $5,000 for ad placement on Facebook. The group alleges that there’s no way to really know how many books were purchased because of the ads, which means there’s no way Cruz can confidently deny receiving royalties on sales of the book that might have a link to his campaign finances.
It’s all very messy, very Ted Cruz-like.
(Via Forbes)