Ted Cruz Under Fire For Failure To Disclose $1 Million In Loans From Goldman Sachs, CitiBank

Would $1 million make a difference in winning or losing a Senate campaign? Does it matter who provided $1 million in loans?

For his 2012 race to win a U.S. Senate seat, former Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz took $1 million in loans from his wife’s employer, the investment banking firm Goldman Sachs, and from CitiBank. But contrary to federal campaign finance laws and to his repeatedly-shared story of personal family sacrifice, Cruz did not disclose the loans to the Federal Election Commission nor to voters, The New York Times reports Wednesday evening.

“Sweetheart, I’d like us to liquidate our entire net worth, liquid net worth, and put it into the campaign,” Cruz repeatedly said he told his wife, bragging how she believed in him so much it took her just seconds to agree.

Cruz, an attorney working for a private Houston law firm in 2012, “put ‘personal funds’ totaling $960,000 into his Senate campaign,” the Times reports. “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.”

The Times adds, “in the first half of 2012, Ted and Heidi Cruz obtained the low-interest loan from Goldman Sachs, as well as another one from Citibank. The loans totaled as much as $750,000 and eventually increased to a maximum of $1 million before being paid down later that year. There is no explanation of their purpose.”

No mention of the loans appears on reports the Ted Cruz for Senate Committee filed with the Federal Election Commission.

The penalty for non-disclosure could be fines and a Senate ethics investigation, but also a sense of distrust from potential voters.

A Cruz spokeserson labeled the non-disclosure as merely “inadvertent.”

Cruz won his 2012 Senate race. That’s him in the photo above, with his wife Heidi on the right, thanking supporters on that Election Day evening. 

Here’s how some are responding on Twitter:

 

This article has been updated for clarity.

Image via Facebook