How Goldman Sachs Is Still Indirectly Supporting Ted Cruz Despite Stopping Political…

After the violent storming of the U.S. Capitol by pro-Trump mobs on January 6, much of corporate America has moved to distance itself from Republican lawmakers like Ted Cruz, who has been accused of helping incite the rioters (which he denies). Among them is Goldman Sachs, which is suspending political donations and conducting “a thorough assessment of how people acted during this period.”

That assessment will not include reviewing the investment bank’s ties to one politician in particular: Ted Cruz, whose wife, Heidi Cruz, serves as a managing director in Goldman Sachs’ Houston office.

“Heidi is a valuable member of our private wealth team, and we don’t judge any of our employees by the records of their spouses or partners,” Goldman Sachs spokesperson and former Clinton White House press secretary Jake Siewert tells Forbes.

A Harvard Business School grad who worked on the National Security Council in the George W. Bush administration, Heidi Cruz joined Goldman as a vice president in 2005, where she became the co-head of private wealth management in the Southwest region, leading an office of 35 people, according to a 2018 profile in The Atlantic. Heidi continued to work for the bank while Ted ran for, and won, a seat representing Texas in the U.S. Senate, where he has been a critic of Wall Street. She took a leave of absence to focus on Ted’s 2016 presidential campaign, but went back to work after Ted finished second in the Republican primaries behind Donald Trump, who attacked her for her looks.

So, while Goldman is suspending the flow of money into politicians’ campaign war chests, it will continue to send cash directly to Ted Cruz’s family. Heidi draws an undisclosed salary from the company, plus she owns between $500,000 and $1 million worth of Goldman stock and a 401(k) account similarly worth up to $1 million, according to Ted Cruz’s latest financial disclosure report, covering the calendar year 2019. The couple owns between $35,000 and $175,000 worth of investments in various Goldman Sachs funds, plus a portfolio of mostly mutual funds and bank accounts worth between $1.2 million and $2.8 million. Forbes estimated that the couple was worth $3.5 million in 2016.

Not that her ties to the firm haven’t at times proven to be a liability. Ted’s 2012 Senate campaign was fined $35,000 by the Federal Election Commission in 2019 for failing to accurately report more than $1.1 million in loans from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, which Cruz used to make donations to the campaign. (A Cruz spokesperson called it an “inadvertent reporting error” at the time.) During the 2016 Republican primaries, Trump criticized Cruz for taking the loans, telling crowds that “Goldman Sachs owns him.”