The regulator set to hear a campaign finance complaint about Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has a yard sign for the senator's campaign at his house, reported the San Antonio Current on Wednesday.
"Trey Trainor, an attorney serving on the Federal Election Commission (FEC) — the panel scheduled to hear the complaint — recently retweeted a photo his wife Lucy Trainor shared of a yard sign outside their Austin-area home promoting the Texas Republican's campaign for a third term in the U.S. Senate," said the report. "'Got my new @tedcruz yard sign installed today,' Lucy Trainor tweeted April 19, 10 days after a pair of campaign-finance watchdogs filed their FEC complaint against Cruz. Trey Trainor retweeted the image the same day his wife posted it."
Per federal contribution records, Trainor also made three contributions to Cruz in 2013, totaling to $325.
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"Trainor's retweet follows last month's report by the Current that FEC Chairman Sean J. Cooksey served as Cruz's deputy chief counsel in 2018. From 2019 until joining the FEC in 2020, Cooksey served as general counsel for Missouri U.S. Senator Josh Hawley, a GOP hardliner frequently aligned with Cruz," noted the report. "Both Trainor and Cooksey are Trump appointees to the six-member FEC, which is comprised of equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats."
The complaint in question stems from iHeartMedia, which hosts Cruz's podcast, making a $630,000 payment to Truth and Courage PAC, which supports Cruz. Senate rules prohibit senators from accepting greater than "nominal value" gifts from companies that employ lobbyists, as iHeartMedia does.
Cruz, for his part, denies that anything about this arrangement is unlawful.
The senator has personally challenged campaign finance laws in the past. For instance, in 2022, after he ran afoul of a law that limited how much he could pay himself back with campaign contributions for money he loaned to his own campaign, he got the Supreme Court to toss out the law altogether.
