Photo credit: Dave Davidson (Prezography.com)
The New York Times “broke” a story yesterday about a Goldman Sachs loan that Ted and Heidi Cruz obtained during his run for U.S. Senate that wasn’t reported properly on an FEC filing. I’ve defended Marco Rubio when New York Times fired garbage at him, and I’ll do the same with Cruz.
This story was one *discovered* from public disclosure forms, and it is a story that already ran in 2013. So the New York Times didn’t run any new news here. All they did was run some opposition research that a rival campaign gave them. *Great* journalism.
This is a non-story. Beyond the fact it is rehashed news taken from public records here are a couple reasons why there’s nothing there.
First, The loan was disclosed. It may not have been on the right FEC form at the right time, but it was made public and it was made public before Cruz’s runoff election against then Texas Lt. Governor Dewey Dewhurst. See exhibit A below:
Secondly, people are insinuating that this is some sort of deal with Goldman Sachs (Heidi Cruz worked in their Houston office). It isn’t. It is a margins loan. This isn’t a special deal. It isn’t free money. It is a loan taken out against his brokerage account. It near zero risk to the brokerage, and anyone who holds an account could qualify for such a loan. So no Cruz was not “purchased” with Goldman Sachs money.
Cruz explains to reporters at a stop in Dorchester, SC.
“The premise of your question is not right,” Cruz responded. “Heidi and I when we ran for Senate, we made a decision to put our liquid net worth into the campaign and we did so through a combination of savings, liquidating our savings accounts, through a combination of selling assets and then we had a brokerage account that has a standard margin loan like any brokerage account had, and we borrowed against the stocks and assets that we had under ordinary terms. And so those loans had been disclosed over and over and over again on multiple filings. If it was the case that they were not filed exactly as the FEC requires, then we’ll amend the filings, but all that information had been public and transparent for many years, and that’s the end of that.”
He was later asked if this was a “serious oversight.”
“It is an inadvertent filing question. The facts of the underlying manner had been disclosed for many, many years. It is not complicated. Our finances are not complicated. We put in the entirety of our savings. We did so through a combination of savings accounts and selling assets and taking a margin loan against other assets. And that – those facts are clear and transparent, and an inadvertent filing error does not change that,” Cruz explained.
Moving on….
Disclosure: This writer has endorsed Ted Cruz for President of the United States.