Ted Cruz Snaps at Reporter for Asking About Questionable Fundraising: ‘It Really Is Sad What’s Happened to the Media’

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) snapped at a reporter on Wednesday after being questioned a sketchy fundraising arrangement with his podcast distributor iHeartMedia.

ABC13 Houston reporter Shannon Ryan asked Cruz about his re-election PAC receiving $630,850 from iHeartMedia – a company which employs lobbyists – despite Cruz’s insistence that he does not get paid to podcast The Verdict with Ted Cruz three times a week.

“So if an entity which employs lobbyists is giving hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to your re-election efforts, how can you say you’re not being compensated?” asked Ryan.

Cruz laughed and replied, “You know, it really is sad what’s happened to the media, which is the media exists right now seemingly to parrot left-wing, Democrat attacks.”

He claimed:

The group that brought that attack is a left-wing, Democrat attack group, and by the way, you know what you didn’t mention in your question? The fact that they filed a complaint with the Senate Ethics Committee raising these same issues. You know what the Senate Ethics Committee did? They threw it out. They said it had no basis in law.

ABC13 went on to report that Cruz was “referencing a 2022 complaint lodged with the Committee which challenged the podcast deal alone and not the money pumped into the PAC the following year, which iHeartMedia has said is sourced from ad revenue from the show.”

Shanna Ports, the senior legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, which filed the ethics complaint against Cruz in 2022, told the Houston Chronicle, “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.”

Watch above via ABC13.