Ted Cruz calls report on his bank loans a ‘hit piece’
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, blasted a New York Times report that he described as a “stunning hit piece” onstage at the Republican presidential debate in South Carolina on Thursday evening.
The Times’ story, which was published Wednesday, reported that Cruz used loans totaling more than $1 million from Citibank and Goldman Sachs to finance his 2012 Senate bid. Cruz, whose wife worked at Goldman Sachs at the time, did not disclose the loans, as required in campaign finance reports filed with the Federal Election Commission.
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When moderator Maria Bartiromo asked Cruz about the Times’ story at the debate, he dismissed it as biased journalism. Cruz pointed to a pair of columns that have appeared in the Times’ opinion pages as evidence that the paper is out to get him.
“Well, Maria, thank you for passing on that hit piece on the front page of the New York Times,” he said. “You know, the nice thing about the mainstream media, they don’t hide their views. The New York Times a few weeks back had a columnist who wrote a column saying, ‘Anybody but Cruz.’ Had that actually — that same columnist wrote a column comparing me to an evil demonic spirit from the movie ‘It Follows,’ that jumps apparently from body to body, possessing people. So, you know, the New York Times and I don’t exactly have the warmest of relationships.”
Cruz also described his 2012 election as an underdog campaign.
“Now in terms of their really stunning hit piece, what they mentioned is when I was running for Senate — unlike Hillary Clinton, I don’t have masses of money in the bank, hundreds of millions of dollars,” Cruz said. “When I was running for Senate, just about every lobbyist, just about all of the establishment, opposed me in the Senate race in Texas, and my opponent in that race was worth over $200 million. He put a $25 million check up from his own pocket to fund that campaign, and my wife, Heidi, and I, we ended up investing everything we owned. We took a loan against our assets to invest it in that campaign to defend ourselves against those attacks.”
Cruz noted that he had disclosed the loan on paperwork he filed with the Senate. He argued that the fact he had left it out of his FEC report was simply a “paperwork error.”
“And the entire New York Times attack is that I disclosed that loan on one filing with the United States Senate, that was a public filing. But it was not on a second filing with the FEC,” Cruz said. “Yes, I made a paperwork error disclosing it on one piece of paper instead of the other. But if that’s the best hit the New York Times has got, they’d better go back to the well.”
