A super PAC supporting Sen. Ted Cruz\u2019s reelection campaign has received nearly $800,000 in receipts from the company that distributes the Texas Republican\u2019s podcast, an arrangement that is attracting scrutiny from campaign finance experts and Democrats.<\/p>\n
Federal law prohibits candidates from soliciting or directing money to super PACs, which can raise unlimited amounts of funds, including corporate money, as long as they do not coordinate with the candidate they are working to elect.<\/p>\n
Some campaign finance watchdogs say it\u2019s hard to believe that Cruz would not have been involved in any arrangement to route the funds from the company that distributes his podcast to the super PAC, known as Truth and Courage PAC.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt just defies credulity that this is a normal business transaction,\u201d said Brett Kappel, a campaign finance lawyer with no involvement in Cruz\u2019s race. \u201cEven if it were, the idea that a super PAC derives a substantial portion of its revenue \u2026 from a commercial business in which a sitting senator is a principal is completely unique and \u2026 raises all sorts of legal and ethical issues.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cruz\u2019s campaign has emphasized he does not get paid personally to do the podcast, although critics say the arrangement raises other issues and requires investigation by the Federal Election Commission.<\/p>\n
End Citizens United \u2014 a group whose political arm has endorsed Cruz\u2019s Democratic opponent, Rep. Colin Allred (Tex.) \u2014 filed an FEC complaint in April alleging Cruz has run afoul of the ban on soliciting or directing money for a super PAC. The group was joined in the complaint by the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan government watchdog group.<\/p>\n
Allred, a congressman from Dallas, has made Cruz\u2019s podcasting a major part of his campaign, accusing the senator of focusing more on being a media personality than serving Texans. Cruz has argued the podcast allows him to bypass traditional media to talk to his constituents about important issues.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow convenient that the mainstream media and the cogs in the machine of the Biden-Pelosi Democrat Party want this to stop,\u201d Cruz campaign spokesperson Macarena Martinez said in a statement for this article.<\/p>\n
The statement reiterated that Cruz appears on the podcast \u201cfor free\u201d but otherwise did not provide details about the arrangement. A spokesperson for the super PAC did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n
Truth and Courage PAC disclosed its latest revenue from iHeartMedia on Thursday, filing a monthly campaign finance report that showed it received $156,186 from a subsidiary of the company on May 15. That brought the total to $787,036, or 8 percent of all the money that has flowed into the super PAC since it was formed in December 2021.<\/p>\n
On campaign finance reports, Truth and Courage PAC has described the money from the iHeartMedia subsidiary as \u201cdigital revenue\u201d or \u201cdigital income.\u201d<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for another iHeartMedia subsidiary, Premiere Networks, said in an email that Premiere Networks sells advertising inventory for Cruz\u2019s podcast and that the money that has gone to the super PAC is \u201cassociated with those advertising sales.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cruz started the podcast, \u201cVerdict with Ted Cruz,\u201d in January 2020 to offer his thoughts on President Donald Trump\u2019s first impeachment trial at the time. IHeartMedia picked up the podcast in 2022, and it now releases episodes multiple times a week.<\/p>\n
In November 2022, the Campaign Legal Center had asked the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate whether the podcast violated a ban on senators accepting gifts from lobbyists, noting that iHeartMedia is a registered lobbyist. A CLC spokesperson said the Ethics Committee dismissed the complaint without explaining why.<\/p>\n
The FEC has a reputation for being to slow to act on complaints, and it has at least two members with ties to Cruz. The chair, Sean J. Cooksey, is a former deputy chief counsel in Cruz\u2019s office, and another member, James E. \u201cTrey\u201d Trainor III, is a longtime GOP lawyer from Texas who drew scrutiny earlier this year for having a Cruz campaign yard sign in his lawn.<\/p>\n
Saurav Ghosh, CLC\u2019s director of federal campaign finance reform, said the situation is a prime candidate for an FEC probe.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is kind of an open question about the exact nature of Cruz\u2019s involvement with the agreement, but I think that is really the kind of detail the FEC can and should investigate and find out,\u201d Ghosh said. \u201cDid Cruz actually have some role in directing this money to the super PAC? Because role-playing in this context is not something he\u2019s legally allowed to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cruz has a history of testing the limits of campaign finance law.<\/p>\n
The Supreme Court in 2022 struck down a law that capped the amount of campaign funds politicians could use to recoup personal loans to their campaigns after elections. The case was brought by Cruz, who loaned his campaign $260,000 \u2014 just $10,000 over the prior limit \u2014 in his 2018 reelection bid, seeming to lay the groundwork for the later legal challenge.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
A super PAC supporting Sen. Ted Cruz\u2019s reelection campaign has received nearly $800,000 in receipts from the company that distributes the Texas Republican\u2019s podcast, an arrangement that is attracting scrutiny from campaign finance experts and Democrats. Federal law prohibits candidates from soliciting or directing money to super PACs, which can raise unlimited amounts of funds, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":5485,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5484"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5484\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}