I hear Cancun is nice
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s office has repeatedly dismissed ethical questions about his three-times-a-week podcasting gig, saying he makes no money from the venture with a company that lobbies Congress.
But over the last year, iHeartMedia, the massive radio network that picked up the “Verdict with Ted Cruz” podcast in 2022, has made regular, and growing, payments to a super PAC supporting the Texas Republican’s reelection effort. The payments, which the media company says are associated with ad revenue from the podcast, total $630,850 — about a third of the $2 million the Truth and Courage PAC reported raising since the start of 2023, according to the latest Federal Election Commission data.
Ethics and campaign finance experts say the payments appear to be a novel arrangement that blur the lines between what is allowed under campaign finance law and Senate ethics rules. Cruz is the top Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee that oversees the communications industry.
“This is not an arrangement we’ve seen before, and it seems like Sen. Cruz is trying to find a way to walk the lines between not falling into an ethics violation and not falling into a campaign finance violation,” said Shanna Ports, senior legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, which filed an ethics complaint about the senator’s podcast deal in 2022.
The Truth and Courage PAC’s stated focus is “ensuring that Ted Cruz is re-elected to the United States Senate in 2024.” It already has started rolling out ads targeting U.S. Rep Colin Allred, the Dallas Democrat and former NFL player running against Cruz in one of the highest-profile races in the nation this November.
Cruz is seen as one of the only potentially vulnerable Republicans in the Senate after narrowly winning reelection in 2018. Cruz’s campaign has been warning donors that the senator already is tied with Allred in polling and bracing for a tougher 2024 reelection campaign than GOP voters might expect.
Ports said the payments from iHeartMedia beg “the question of whether this is an unlawful contribution.” Federal officeholders are prohibited from soliciting a contribution of over $5,000 to a super PAC or directing over $5,000 to a super PAC. So if Cruz told iHeartMedia that it could or should move money to the super PAC, he could be in violation of that law, Ports said.
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IHeartMedia’s latest payment to the PAC, $214,752.98 on Feb. 15, was first reported by Forbes. It was highlighted on social media by Sawyer Hackett, a Democratic strategist working for the Lose Cruz PAC, which has run ads attacking Cruz for the time he spends recording and promoting the podcast. Hackett called for the Senate Ethics Committee and Federal Election Commission to investigate.
The extent of the payments, which go back to March 1, 2023, have not been previously reported.
The Truth and Courage PAC did not respond to questions about how the payments came to be or how it was using the money. The PAC reports the payments not as political contributions, but as “other receipts,” which Ports said is typically how super PACs report money they earn from things like selling lists of mailing or email addresses of past contributors.
The payments come directly from the iHeartMedia company, which is headquartered in San Antonio. Cruz’s super PAC appears to be the only political organization to receive regular payments from the company, according to FEC records. The network has its own PAC that regularly gives to politicians on both sides of the aisle, though in much smaller increments.
Rachel Nelson, vice president of public relations at iHeartMedia, said the network sells the advertising inventory for Cruz’s podcast “as it does for other podcasts — this is a common practice.” Nelson said the payments are “associated with those advertising sales.”
“Senator Cruz volunteers his time to host this podcast and isn’t compensated for it,” Nelson said.
But ethics experts say Cruz is clearly getting something out of the deal.
“Volunteering generally means you’re doing something expecting no personal benefit, but Cruz here is clearly benefiting from the ad revenue that is being generated by his iHeartMedia show,” said Robert Maguire, research director at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog group. “He will be getting political support from iHeartMedia’s ad revenues.”
The “volunteers his time” claim is just an insult to everyone’s intelligence. Robert Maguire has this exactly right. The money doesn’t have to be going into Ted Cruz’s pocket for it to be a payment to him. It’s going to his campaign, in a form that is at the least skirting existing law, if not actually illegal. If this truly were a volunteer gig then no money would be changing hands at all. Heck, even if IHeartMedia declined to sell ads on Cruz’s behalf, just having his dumb show on their network is a benefit to Cruz and therefore an in-kind contribution to his campaign. Ted Cruz can pay for his own hosting and sell his own ads, as many independent podcast producers do, or he can get out of the Senate and make podcasting his life’s work, in which case IHeartMedia is welcome to have him on their roster. How much he’d be worth to them under those conditions is another question. The point here is that both IHeartMedia and Ted Cruz are benefitting financially from this arrangement. No one who doesn’t have a basic understanding of how the world works can honestly dispute that. The Current has more.