Ted Cruz Bags Big Bucks From Rail King Who Lobbies Washington

And he says he’s against the “Washington cartel.”

Julio Cortez/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz routinely calls himself the conservative grassroots candidate and slams “the Washington cartel.” Yet when it comes to financing his campaign, the Texas senator sticks to business as usual. One of his most generous supporters recently has been a Missouri businessman who has made millions of dollars off government contracts and has spent large sums on a lobbying effort to curry favor within the nation’s capital.

On March 7, Herzog Contracting Corp., a construction giant based in St. Joseph, Missouri, and specializing in highway and railroad building, donated $1 million to Trusted Leadership PAC, one of the several interlinked super-PACs that have been raising and spending millions to support Cruz. The same day, Cruz’s campaign paid the company more than $87,000 for “travel,” according to the campaign’s filings with the Federal Elections Commission.

Cruz appears to have made regular use of the company’s jets. Since December 22, his campaign has paid the contracting company more than $430,000 for travel expenses. The actual travel details are not specified in the filings, but the most obvious explanation is that Cruz was paying for use of the firm’s aircraft. Herzog Contracting owns five planes, including two corporate jets (and a historic bi-plane). One of the jets is a 22-seat Bombardier Challenger that costs thousands of dollars an hour to operate. In March, the Cruz campaign paid the company $178,000 in total for travel expenses.

Herzog Contracting is run by Stan Herzog, who has overseen the company’s rise to prominence as one of the nation’s top builders of railway lines and other major infrastructure projects. On April 1, in one of the company’s many federal-funding-dependent deals, Herzog’s company kicked off construction of an $187 million expansion of a light rail system in the Orlando, Florida, area. This may be an unlikely line of work for a Cruz supporter, given that government rail projects tend to be objects of hatred for fiscal conservatives. Yet in the last year, Herzog and his company donated $335,000 to various pro-Cruz super-PACs.

Herzog has previously been a substantial funder of other Republican candidates, most of whom are seen as closer to the party’s mainstream. In 2012, his company donated $1.25 million to the super-PAC supporting Mitt Romney. Herzog has personally donated the maximum amount to the National Republican Congressional Committee. He also gave $250,000 to the effort to block the recall of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who gleefully killed a major rail expansion through Wisconsin in 2010.

The company has lobbied in Washington for years. In 2015, Herzog Contracting’s rail subsidiary spent $120,000 on a federal lobbying operation that targeted the Federal Railroad Administration and Congress.

Neither the Cruz campaign nor Herzog responded to requests for comment on their relationship. But winning all that financial support from Herzog is certainly a big victory for the self-described “Washington outsider.”

This story has been updated.

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.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

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.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate