Just six weeks after he dropped out – and more than a month before Cruz would dramatically snub the nominee at the Republican National Convention – the senator quietly began renting his vast donor email file to his former rival, pocketing at least tens of thousands of dollars, and more likely hundreds of thousands, that can be used to bankroll the Texan’s own political future.
Trump began paying to solicit some of Cruz’s supporters for campaign cash as early as June 17. “We need you to stand with Mr. Trump before it is too late,” read the initial Trump campaign missive. A second solicitation came the next day. Another came the day after that. All told, in the last three months Trump has emailed at least some segments of Cruz’s donor list more than 30 times.
Indeed, only hours before Cruz pointedly and publicly refused to endorse – “Vote your conscience,” he said in July, as he was booed off the RNC stage and his wife whisked from the crowd for her own safety – the senator had rented his email list to Trump. “We must seize this moment to build on our momentum and Make America First Again,” Eric Trump wrote in an email to Cruz’s list earlier that day.
The exact details of Trump’s financial arrangement with Cruz are unclear, and loose federal record-keeping makes it impossible to verify. But an email rate sheet obtained by POLITICO shows that Cruz asks campaigns to pay more than $22,000 for the right to send a single email his list of 280,000 digital donors.
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