Taxpayers paid portion of Cruz's political trips

Paul Singer | USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Two months after staging a marathon Senate speech to protest the growth of government spending, Sen. Ted Cruz took a New York fundraising swing highlighted by a visit with Donald Trump — and put it on the taxpayers' tab.

The trip, which cost more than $1,200, was one of several taxpayer-funded excursions the Texas Republican has taken to political events.

Senate rules mandate that official funds — allocated to each senator to operate their Capitol Hill office — "may only be used for official purposes," and "No official resources may be used to conduct campaign activities," according to the Senate Ethics Committee.

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In the wake of his announcement last month that he is running for president, Cruz's use of his Senate office funds demonstrates how murky the line can be between official and political travel. USA TODAY recently tracked similar trips taken by Hillary Clinton, who may also be a presidential contender in 2016. During her Senate tenure, Clinton traveled on the taxpayer dime to several "official" events sponsored by political backers as she geared up for her 2008 presidential bid.

"For mixed-purpose trips, the Senate encourages offices to divide expenses based on a reasonable standard. Sen. Cruz has gone above and beyond any reasonable standard for determining official vs. unofficial costs. He places the utmost priority on ensuring prudent use of taxpayer dollars," campaign spokesman Rick Tyler said.

Cruz did not announce the Trump visit on his office website. A report in Politico the day before the visit quoted an unnamed Cruz spokeswoman as noting that Trump and Cruz were friends and met during "some down time in NYC" for Cruz during a fundraising tour.

His campaign defended Cruz's use of taxpayer money for the travel, noting that he did official business on the trip. Cruz appeared in-studio that Friday afternoon on the Fox News program Happening Now — though he had been on other Fox programs several days earlier from Washington. Tyler said Cruz paid for non-official expenses of the New York trip out of his own pocket.

During an appearance in July 2013 at the Western Conservative Summit in Denver, Cruz invited guests to join his grass-roots movement to "take this country back" and to "take out your cellphone and text the word 'growth' to 33733," which sent the texts back to Cruz's campaign website.

Cruz and the regional director of his Dallas Senate office spent at least $800 in taxpayer money to travel to the conference, a Western version of the bigger Conservative Political Action Conference held near Washington each year.

The senator asked attendees to sign a petition to defund President Obama's signature health care law, giving a Web address run by the Senate Conservatives Fund, a super PAC that spent heavily in 2014 elections to elect conservative candidates.

Cruz repeated this refrain at other events that year. The same month as the New York trip, Cruz spoke at a "Restoration Weekend" event in Palm Beach, Fla., hosted by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a conservative organization that says it "combats the efforts of the radical left and its Islamist allies to destroy American values and disarm this country as it attempts to defend itself in a time of terror."

He urged the audience to join a grass-roots movement and log on to a website — makedclisten.org — to upload their stories about the problems caused by Obamacare. That site was operated by Cruz's PAC, the Jobs, Growth and Freedom Fund, which maintains a "makeDClisten" Twitter account.

Cruz and senior adviser Charles Roy were both reimbursed from his Senate office for travel expenses to Palm Beach and nearby Fort Lauderdale during this time period, but there is no way to determine what portion of that $2,300 expense is related to the Restoration Weekend appearance. Cruz's PAC reported spending $1,554 at the Breakers, the hotel where the conference was held, indicating Cruz divided political and official expenses that weekend.

In February 2014, Cruz was back in Florida, again on the taxpayers' expense, to receive the Statesman of the Year award by the Sarasota Republican Party. Breitbart News described it this way: "An event originally scheduled as a small rally for potential 2016 presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) mushroomed into a major political event after nearly 2,000 people RSVP'd online." According to Breitbart, after the award ceremony, "Cruz will attend a $500 per person VIP fundraiser and, to wrap up the evening, a $5,000 per couple private donor dinner," benefiting the local party.

Cruz was reimbursed from his office account for $1,615 in travel costs from Houston to Tampa and Palm Beach, Fla., during that period, Senate records show.

Under Senate rules, "it is very easy to classify something that is a political event in front of political supporters as not being a campaign event and being part of your official duties," said Bill Allison, senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit group that advocates government transparency. "As long as they never use the magic words, 'Will you vote for me?' "

Any trip paid for with public money should have "some kind of official public component," said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the watchdog Center for Responsive Politics. This would be particularly relevant for Cruz, Krumholz said, because he has "inveighed against wasteful government spending."

"I think we have a deep spending problem in this country, and Congress had abdicated its responsibility and built a record debt," Cruz said in a 21-hour speech on the Senate floor in September 2013 to protest raising the federal debt ceiling and not repealing the Affordable Care Act.