Ted Cruz’s Cringe Podcast Is About to Get Him in Serious Trouble

Ted Cruz’s podcast may be crossing some major lines.

The Campaign Legal Center, or CLC, a nonprofit organization, filed a complaint against the Texas senator on Tuesday with the Federal Election Commission. The watchdog group argues that the Verdict With Ted Cruz podcast can’t send its profits to a super PAC that supports Cruz’s campaign.

Cruz’s podcast, produced with iHeartMedia, generates hundreds of thousands of dollars, and may be a lucrative loophole in campaign finance law since he’s making the money himself. But, as The Daily Beast found, it raises a number of legal and ethical issues.

For one, campaign finance records show that at least seven lobbyists registered to represent iHeartMedia’s interests have donated tens of thousands of dollars to Cruz’s campaign since the podcast launched in 2022, The Daily Beast reports. Cruz and iHeartMedia claim that he doesn’t get paid for the podcast, volunteering his time instead, so the money is reported as “digital revenue” from ads on the podcast.

The CLC also filed a complaint over the podcast in 2022, claiming that Cruz accepting podcast production services from iHeartMedia violated a federal law that bars senators from receiving gifts from registered lobbyists. But Cruz has escaped any legal action or penalties since then.

Campaign finance law prohibits coordination between candidates—who are limited by how much money they can raise—and super PACs, which don’t have any limits on how much they can raise and spend from individuals and corporations. A candidate can’t raise any corporate money, let alone hundreds of thousands of dollars of it, to go into a super PAC.

And there’s no secret why Cruz is looking for every dollar he can get: He has a tough competitor for his Senate seat in Colin Allred, a Democratic representative and former NFL player and civil rights lawyer. After Allred won the Democratic Senate primary, Cruz was spooked so much that he begged for campaign donations in a Fox News interview.

Cruz already had a reputation for challenging campaign finance law, even without his ethically questionable podcast. It looks like he’ll keep trying to raise money however he can, and worry about the ethics later.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer’s latest potential book deal about the impeachment effort into President Joe Biden might actually put him in the crosshairs of an ethics investigation.

In a letter sent Tuesday to the Office of Congressional Ethics, the watchdog group Congressional Integrity Project requested a probe into Comer’s deal, citing House Rule 25 as the basis for their request. The group noted that “members may not ‘receive copyright royalties under a contract … unless that contract is first approved by the Standards Committee.’”

“As Representative Comer continues to hold hearings and attempts to build the case to impeach President Biden, the American people deserve to know the extent to which he is benefiting financially. It is clear already that he has a political motive to impeach the President and it should be revealed if he has a financial motive as well,” the letter stated.

Comer has already admitted that the impeachment was a dud. Last month, the Oversight chair confessed that criminal referrals were the most accountability that his meritless, wayward impeachment probe was going to achieve. That is, of course, a far cry from the investigation’s original goal, which was to remove Biden from office.

But the floundering impeachment effort—which was predominantly founded on a web of lies reportedly manufactured by top Russian intelligence officials—won’t rain on Comer’s parade. Instead, the Kentucky Republican appears to be attempting to turn the saga into a book deal. Last month, a placeholder image appeared on HarperCollins’s website featuring a book by Comer titled All the President’s Money, with an expected publication date of September 10. Comer has since disavowed the posting but didn’t reject that a deal is on the table.

“The link was put up in error by Harper Collins,” Comer spokesman Austin Hacker told Axios. “It was not authorized by Congressman Comer and he immediately requested it be taken down.”

“Although he has been in discussions with Harper Collins about a potential book, he has not entered into a publishing agreement with any publisher including Harper Collins,” Hacker added.

But the Congressional Integrity Project isn’t convinced that it’s a clean deal.

“From the beginning, this impeachment investigation was nothing but a political stunt and a desperate call for attention from James Comer—and this potential book deal further proves it,”  said the organization’s executive director, Kyle Herrig, in a statement.

“Comer and his fellow MAGA House Republicans have spent the last 15 months investigating the President and have not discovered a single shred of evidence of wrongdoing. The American people deserve to know where Comer’s true priorities lie—with doing Donald Trump’s bidding and making a quick buck with a book or with the important issues like health care and the cost of living that are affecting Americans across the country.”

If Donald Trump wins the 2024 election, will he leave office gracefully at the end of his second term? Fox News host Jesse Watters seems to think so, despite Trump’s track record.

“Everybody knows Trump’s going to leave office just like he did the last time,” Watters said on the network Monday night, comparing the attitudes of Democrats who worry about Trump’s autocratic tendencies to people who get scared about the sun disappearing permanently after an eclipse.

Does Watters remember what happened after the 2020 election? If Trump will leave office “just like he did the last time,” does that mean he’ll refuse to concede his time is up, threaten violence, and then foment an insurrection? Does Watters realize that from now on, transitions of power in the United States carry a fear of violence, something that was once unthinkable?

And that’s not even getting into the election denialism that has now become pervasive in the Republican Party, which began with the “Stop the Steal” movement. All of this has led to the very credible fear of bad things happening after the election this November and in future years, no matter how the results go.

We got a hint of what would happen in 2020 when, in 2016, Trump said he would accept the election results “if I win.” And now, Watters and the rest of Fox News are trying to have the public forget about who Trump is and how he handles elections, perhaps because they plan to help him as November draws closer. And of course, if reality clashes with Watters and Fox News, they will blame the left, just like last time.

Ken Buck took a red pen to a flattering characterization of his former colleague Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, refusing to yield that the Georgia Republican was anything but a headache in Congress.

In an interview Monday night on CNN’s OutFront, the former Colorado representative strongly disagreed with a warm review of Greene by ousted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who likened the MAGA lawmaker to a policy hawk.

“Well, I think Kevin is much more experienced talking to Marjorie about policy than I do, first of all,” Buck told host Erin Burnett.

“Secondly, my experience with Marjorie is, people have talked to her about not filing articles of impeachment on President Biden before he was sworn into office, on not filing articles of impeachment that were groundless made on other individuals in the Biden administration,” he continued. “And she was never moved by that. She was always focused on her social media account.”

But, from where Buck stands, Greene doesn’t just suffer from a distracting social media addiction—she’s also blindly following the will of the Kremlin.

“Moscow Marjorie is focused now on this Ukraine issue and getting her talking points from the Kremlin and making sure that she is popular and she is getting a lot of coverage,” he said, echoing two other Republican lawmakers who have warned that many in the GOP are pushing Russian propaganda.

Buck left his post in the House last month amid another bout of seemingly endless Republican-fueled chaos, torching the lower chamber as “dysfunctional” and one of the worst legislative bodies in the “nine years and three months that I’ve been in Congress.”

“Instead of having decorum, instead of operating in a professional manner, this place has just devolved into this bickering and nonsense and not really doing the job for the American people,” Buck said shortly after handing in his less-than-two-weeks notice to House leadership.

Meanwhile, Greene has filed a motion to vacate House Speaker Mike Johnson after he worked with Democrats and Republicans in the Senate to pass a $1.2 trillion omnibus bill, finalizing one of the legislature’s primary responsibilities: funding the government.

With all the recent departures, House Republicans need almost complete unity to pass legislation on their policy agenda. At the moment, the caucus can spare just one seat on any vote—one of the slimmest majorities in U.S. history.

Senator Elizabeth Warren is warning that Israel’s devastating military campaign in Gaza, which has killed more than 33,000 people, could legally be considered a genocide.

Warren made the comments during an event last week at a Boston-area mosque. Video of her speech began circulating on social media on Monday. The death toll in Gaza, which includes at least 13,000 children, is considered a low estimate due to the difficulty in counting the dead.

“If you want to do it as an application of law, I believe that they’ll find that it is genocide, and they have ample evidence to do so,” Warren said, speaking at the Islamic Center of Boston in Wayland, Massachusetts. She was responding to an audience question about the International Court of Justice ruling that it was “plausible” Israel has committed acts of genocide in Gaza.

Warren noted that, for her, “it is far more important to say what Israel is doing is wrong. And it is wrong.”

“It is wrong to starve children within a civilian population in order to try to bend to your will. It is wrong to drop 2,000-pound bombs, in densely populated civilian areas,” she said.

Warren faced criticism for her stance on the war when she backed Israel after Hamas’s October 7 attacks. As Israel’s war ramped up, along with international criticism of its actions, protesters have shown up outside of Warren’s offices, as well as her home. One Palestinian American even confronted Warren at a restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in November. Warren also voted to send more military aid to Israel in February, part of a bill that defunded the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.

Warren’s new stance is the latest example of Democrats criticizing Israel’s actions. On March 22, Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez warned that the United States was complicit in the humanitarian crisis in the territory, and on March 15, Senator Chuck Schumer gave a speech criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct in Gaza.

Warren was also among eight Democratic senators who called on President Joe Biden in an open letter in March to suspend military aid to Israel while it blocked U.S. humanitarian aid to Gaza.

More recently, the White House had to cancel its annual iftar banquet with American Muslim leaders last week after invitations were rejected in protest of America’s Israel military campaign. On Monday, the Foreign Press Association issued a statement urging international journalists to be allowed unfettered access into Gaza, which Israel’s government continues to block.