Republican presidential candidate [crscore]Ted Cruz[/crscore] is admitting to “a technical and inadvertent filing error” after it was revealed he didn’t disclose loans from big banks, including his wife’s employer Goldman Sachs, when he ran for the Senate in 2012.
The New York Times reported Thursday that the Texas Republican senator and his wife took out several loans, including from Goldman Sachs and Citibank, to give more than $1 million of their personal money into the 2012 campaign. Under campaign finance laws, candidates are required to disclose on forms to the Federal Election Commission from where money was borrowed. But those loans weren’t listed.
Confronted by reporters, Cruz said the loans have been listed on other disclosure forms since then: “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.”
“Our finances are not complicated,” Cruz said. “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’s wife, Heidi, has worked for Goldman Sachs in Houston and is currently on unpaid leave during her husband’s presidential campaign. The New York Times noted that nothing appeared improper about the loans themselves: “Both loans had floating interest rates around 3 percent, according to Mr. Cruz’s Senate disclosures, which appear to be generally in line with rates available to wealthy borrowers at that time.” (VIDEO: Trump: I Wouldn’t Want To Run For President If Our Country Was Doing Well)
One of Cruz’s rivals angling for the conservative populist vote is already using the issue against him. In an email to reporters, Matt Beynon, a spokesman for former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, referred to the candidate as “Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Goldman Sachs).”