Republican presidential candidate and Senator Ted Cruz (Tex.) slammed The New York Times in Thursday night’s debate over an article about loans he took out from Goldman Sachs as well as Times columnist David Brooks for his repeated attacks on Cruz with one referring to him as “satanic.”
Co-moderator Maria Bartiromo posed this question to Cruz in the second segment of the debate with a brief summary of the Times story: “Senator Cruz, The New York Times is reporting that you failed to properly disclose a million dollars in loans from Goldman Sachs and Citibank during your Senate race. Your campaign says it was inadvertent. A million dollars is inadvertent?”
Cruz first took a shot at Baritromo by sarcastically thanking her “for passing on that hit piece on the front page of The New York Times,” but continued on by commenting on how “the nice thing about the mainstream media” is “they don't hide their views.”
He then pointed to the nasty hits leveled against him by the so-called moderate, right-leaning Brooks:
The New York Times a few weeks back had a columnist who wrote a column saying anybody but Cruz, had that same columnist actually wrote a column comparing me to an evil, demonic spirit from the movie It Follows that jumps apparently from body to body possessing people. So, you know The New York Times and I don't exactly have the warmest of relationships.
Returning to answer the question directly, Cruz brought up the lavish wealth that Hillary Clinton and his 2012 Senate primary opponent David Dewhurst possessed compared to him and then relayed his recollection of how he and wife Heidi came to take out the loan: “[M]y wife Heidi and I, we ended up investing everything we owned. We took a loan against our assets to invest it in that campaign to defend ourselves against those attacks.”
Cruz added that where the Times went wrong was that he already “disclosed that loan on one filing with the United States Senate, that was a public filing but it was not on a second filing with the FEC.”
He concluded with one last zing at the liberal newspaper: “[B]ut if that is the best hit The New York Times has got, they better go back to the well.”
The relevant portion of the transcript from FBN’s Republican Presidential Candidates Debate on January 14 can be found below.
FBN’s Republican Presidential Candidates Debate
January 14, 2016
9:20 p.m. EasternMARIA BARTIROMO: Senator Cruz, The New York Times is reporting that you failed to properly disclose a million dollars in loans from Goldman Sachs and Citibank during your Senate race. Your campaign says it was inadvertent. A million dollars is inadvertent?
REPUBLICAN SENATOR TED CRUZ (Tex.): Well, Maria, thank you for passing on that hit piece on the front page of The New York Times. You know, the nice thing about the mainstream media, they don't hide their views. The New York Times a few weeks back had a columnist who wrote a column saying anybody but Cruz, had that same columnist actually wrote a column comparing me to an evil, demonic spirit from the movie It Follows that jumps apparently from body to body possessing people. So, you know The New York Times and I don't exactly have the warmest of relationships. Now, terms of their really stunning hit piece, what they mentioned is when I was running for Senate, unlike Hillary Clinton, I don’t have masses of money in the bank, hundreds of millions of dollars. When I was running for Senate, just about every lobbyist, just about all the establishment opposed me in the Senate race in Texas and my opponent in that race was worth over $200 million. He put a $25 million check up from his own pocket to fund that campaign and my wife Heidi and I, we ended up investing everything we owned. We took a loan against our assets to invest it in that campaign to defend ourselves against those attacks and entire New York Times attack is that I disclosed that loan on one filing with the United States Senate, that was a public filing but it was not on a second filing with the FEC. Both of those filings were public and yes, I made a paperwork error disclosing it on one piece of paper instead of the other, but if that is the best hit The New York Times has got, they better go back to the well.
