Ted Cruz fined $35,000 for not properly disclosing campaign loans from Goldman Sachs, Citibank

WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz's 2012 Senate Campaign was fined $35,000 last month by the Federal Elections Commission for improperly disclosing $1.1 million in loans from big banks.

Cruz did not properly disclose loans to his campaign from both Goldman Sachs Group — where his wife, Heidi Cruz, was employed at the time — and Citigroup. The information came to light in 2016 during his failed bid for the Republican presidential nomination. Cruz called it an "inadvertent filing error" at the time.

In 2017, the Federal Election Commission announced it would audit Cruz after the Campaign Legal Center submitted a complaint about the improper disclosure.

"This is old news — simply the conclusion of the same inadvertent reporting error that was widely reported during the presidential campaign," Cruz spokeswoman Catherine Frazier said in a written statement at the time.

The FEC's decision to fine Cruz's 2012 campaign comes three years after the complaint was first filed.

The FEC's vote to audit Cruz in 2017 was unanimous, something unusual for the FEC Board that at the time included five directors. Due to retirements and lack of appointments since that time, the board is now at four directors, the bare minimum needed for a quorum.

“Today’s announcement is an acknowledgement that Cruz’s campaign deprived voters of that critical information,” Campaign Legal Center Senior Director Tara Malloy said in a statement Friday. “In the homestretch of a high-profile election, voters were misled about Cruz’s personal and campaign finances. This is particularly harmful given that financial issues were at issue in the campaign and could have factored into voters’ decision-making at the ballot box.”