Ted Cruz: Failure to disclose Goldman Sachs loan was "inadvertent"
Sen. Ted Cruz says that his failure to properly disclose a low-interest loan he received from his wife's employer, Goldman Sachs, for his 2012 Senate campaign amounts to an "inadvertent filing error."
Questions about the loan came up as Cruz was on the presidential campaign trail in Dorchester, South Carolina. While he was talking to voters there, the New York Times published a report revealing that Cruz received low-interest loans from Goldman Sachs and Citibank, for as much as $1 million total, while he was running to represent Texas in the Senate. He did not, however, report the loans to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), as required.
When asked about the unreported loans on Wednesday, Cruz told reporters that he and his wife Heidi Cruz funded his 2012 campaign with a combination of savings, sold assets and borrowing against their brokerage account.
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"We had a brokerage account that has a standard margin loan like any brokerage account has, and we borrowed against the stocks and assets that we had under ordinary terms," he said. "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 of the information has been public and transparent for many years."
When pressed on the matter, Cruz added, "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 those facts are clear and transparent. And a technical and inadvertent filing error does not change that at all."
Cruz was an insurgent candidate in 2012, who with the support of anti-Wall Street tea partiers, beat the GOP establishment's Senate pick, then-Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, in the Republican primary.
Heidi Cruz is currently on leave from her position as a Goldman Sachs executive to help with her husband's presidential campaign.
