This has not been a good week for Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. First he is the butt of a cutting joke by Democratic Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota (who told "USA Today" that "I like Ted Cruz probably more than my colleagues like Ted Cruz, and I hate Ted Cruz"), and now the Federal Election Commission has ruled against him — unanimously, no less.
The three Republican FEC members joined the two Democrats to find that Cruz failed to properly account for loans he had received from two banks, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, during the 2012 election, according to a report by Bloomberg. Cruz borrowed $1.1 million worth of loans from the banks during his Senate campaign in Texas, with the FEC determining that Cruz had loaned his campaign $800,000 from Goldman Sachs (where his wife Heidi works) and $264,000 from Citigroup.
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While Cruz was permitted to do this, he was legally required to disclose that he borrowed money from banks and describe both the interest rate and term attached to the loan. When his failure to do so was first noticed in January 2016, Cruz was in the middle of running for president. His campaign spokeswoman, Catherine Frazier, tried to downplay the error by describing his failure to disclose the loan as "inadvertent."
Although Cruz did partially self-fund his Senate campaign, he did not do so as much as he had claimed, which is how the issue came to the FEC's attention. Of the loans that Cruz made to his campaign in 2011 and 2012, roughly $300,000 came from personal assets that he had liquidated.
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