Guess What Ted Cruz Is Not Telling the Truth About Now?

Hint: it has something to do with money.

Charlie Neibergall/AP Photo

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Fresh off his victory in Iowa, Ted Cruz is intensifying his anti-Washington rhetoric, even as his campaign barrels forward fueled by large amounts of cash from the people he claims to stand against. In an email to grassroots supporters sent Tuesday afternoon, Cruz begged recipients to hurry up and send cash to help him fight “the Washington cartel,” and he claimed falsely that “I will never get—nor do I want—money from the D.C. lobbyists or the special interest billionaires.”

Not only is this not true; it’s easy to prove, since Cruz has a well-documented history of bagging money from lobbyists and special-interest billionaires.

For example, during his 2012 run for the Senate, Cruz accepted $125,450 in donations from 92 registered lobbyists (and $21,500 from their family members). We know this because the lobbyists are required to report their donations to political candidates. (A full list of lobbyists donating to Cruz’s Senate campaign can be found at OpenSecrets.org, where I used to work.)

Some of the lobbyists Cruz took money from include Eric Ueland and Daniel Meyer of Goldman Sachs (a combined $3,000); C. Boyden Gray ($2,500), whose past clients include Exelon and FirstEnergy; five reps from Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway ($13,750); and Jennifer Gray-Bonnar of Koch Industries ($1,250).

 

Cruz’s presidential campaign has also received money from lobbyists. For example, on November 24, Cruz’s campaign picked up $1,000 from former Georgia Republican Rep. Jack Kingston who is now a principal at mega-lobbying firm Squire Patton Boggs.

Cruz also was speaking falsely when he claimed his presidential campaign takes no money from special-interest billionaires. On November 18, his campaign banked the maximum donation of $2,700 from Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and another $2,700 from this billionaire’s wife, Miriam. Two of the Adelson’s children (and their spouses) each gave the maximum to Cruz’s campaign, bringing the Adelson clan’s grand total to $16,200. Another billionaire with special interests who shelled out cash to keep Cruz’s “grassroots” campaign going has been Adelson’s Las Vegas rival Steve Wynn. He and his wife each donated $2,700 for Cruz’s primary bid. By the way, Cruz’s super-PAC has received multimillion-dollar contributions from several billionaires, including Robert Mercer, a hedge fund titan who’s had trouble with federal regulators.

The Cruz campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

The full text of Cruz’s dubious fundraising plea is here.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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