FEC fines Cruz for not disclosing 2012 campaign loans
The Federal Election Commission this week issued a $35,000 fine to Sen. Ted Cruz for failing to disclose more than $1 million in campaign loans from Citibank and Goldman Sachs.
The commission found that the Texas Republican took out loans from the banks for use in his 2012 Senate campaign but improperly reported them as coming from his “personal funds,” according to the settlement agreement posted online by the Campaign Legal Center.
“As has repeatedly been reported, the loans were public at the time and fully disclosed on Senate ethics disclosures, but they weren’t reported correctly on the FEC forms,” said Cruz spokeswoman Catherine Frazier, referring to a New York Times report from 2016. “This agreed settlement resolves that filing mistake once and for all.”
A complaint filed by the Campaign Legal Center as well as another nonprofit, Democracy 21, prompted the investigation.
“Candidates should take seriously their legal requirement to disclose where their campaign money comes from,” said Tara Malloy, the center’s senior director of appellate litigation and strategy. “Today’s announcement is an acknowledgment that Cruz’s campaign deprived voters of that critical information.”
Of the $1.43 million in loans Cruz reported as personal funds, he actually borrowed $800,000 with three loans secured by a Goldman Sachs brokerage account he held jointly with his wife and $264,000 from a Citibank line of credit, the agreement shows.
In a conciliation agreement with the commission, the Cruz campaign admitted that the loan and line of credit were “inadvertently omitted” from disclosure reports. Cruz has said that he did report the loans on personal financial disclosure forms required by the Senate.
The commission did not find that the errors were “knowing and willful” and said the complaint did not contain sufficient evidence to show that the Cruz campaign “intentionally failed to disclose.”