Watchdogs file complaint against Cruz on undisclosed loans

Campaign finance watchdogs are calling on the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to investigate allegations that GOP presidential hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) failed to report loans from his 2012 Senate race.

{mosads}The complaint on Wednesday from the Campaign Legal Center and Democracy 21 comes about a week after The New York Times reported Cruz had failed to disclose two loans worth up to $500,000 each, one from Citibank and another from Goldman Sachs.

While Cruz claimed that he and his wife had liquidated their “entire net worth,” and put it into the campaign, the Campaign Legal Center said it appears he used both personal and joint assets to secure loans from the two banks and then failed to disclose he had done so.

“The failure to report these loans is a clear cut violation of the law and kept voters in the dark about the money behind the Cruz campaign,” Paul Ryan, the center’s deputy executive director, said in a news release. “If he also used his wife’s assets to obtain these unreported loans, he caused his committee to accept illegal excessive contributions from his wife.”

The revelation of the Goldman Sachs loan came a day before the GOP’s most recent primary debate and the Fox Business Network moderators were quick to confront him with the accusations.

Since then, Cruz’s rivals for the Republican presidential nomination — particularly Donald Trump and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) — have hit him over the loans, accusing the conservative firebrand of hypocrisy.

“You know, he talks about he’s going to be Robin Hood, he’s protecting, then it finds out on his personal disclosure form he didn’t disclose that he’s borrowing a lot of money from Goldman Sachs,” Trump said Saturday.

“So he obviously didn’t want the voters to know he is totally controlled lock, stock and barrel by Citibank and by Goldman Sachs. And I think that’s very hypocritical, I’ll be honest with you, I think it’s very, very hypocritical.”