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This is not a wrinkle I had ever thought about and am frankly a little surprised to find that it is apparently required.

Seems to be common sense! Why wouldn't you provide a full accounting of where the money came from? Pretending to be an independent person, when in fact you are just a middle man for some other, nefarious individual, is an old and obvious trick. What's even weirder is that this is Ted Cruz, not some third party, loaning to his own campaign a bunch of cash. It doesn't take a genius to figure out, "oh, maybe I should report that this money isn't from my savings or something, but is from Goldman Sachs." Filling out the paperwork, me being an idiot, I would immediately wonder if I should include that obviously important information!

Though if the intent is to hide a Goldman Sachs connection, then it's perfectly reasonable to not include Goldman Sachs into the FEC report.

Cruz didn't hide the loan. It was fully reported on his Senate financial disclosure forms. It has been public information from day one.

Well, when was the first financial disclosure filed and when did it first make it "public"? If it's the July form, the nomination fight is basically over. Dewhurst is a gonner. Considering the earliest article I've seen on the topic is in 2013, evidently Cruz's actions kept it unnoticed long enough for him to win the entire election. How long would it have gone unnoticed, considering his campaign rhetoric of "liquidating networth and savings," if Cruz had included it in the FEC filing instead of a financial disclosure form? I'll also add that the financial disclosure form has the added bonus of not using the words "Used for my campaign" written on it. Would someone looking at it know it wasn't a loan for a new fancy house or something?

First, you need to recognize that a candidate for major office does not prepare and file his own FEC reports. This is delegated to staff, reporting to the campaign Treasurer. Obviously the candidate is ultimately responsible for anything filed in his name, but candidates do not enter the data themselves or go line by line checking the details. That's what staff is for.

The campaign would have been obligated to report all donations, and to identify the donor if the contribution was over a threshold amount. The campaign would also have had to disclose all loans. Staff dutifully enters everything into a database and populates all the fields.

So far, so good. If a campaign gets a S1,000 check from you, it will record and report to the FEC a $1,000 contribution or loan from Greetings_Puny_Humans. You will not receive a phone call back asking where you got the money. It may have come out of your checking or savings account. You may have written it on a line of credit. (Gasp: the way the Cruz thing is being reported, if your line of credit is with BigEvilBank, the reporters would all run around saying BigEvilBank is loaning money to Cruz ....) There are any number of ways you could have come up with the funds. This is none of the campaign's business. Nor should it be.

There are apparently more stringent rules governing candidate loans to their own campaigns. I don't know. Cruz's personal loan to the campaign WAS reported to the FEC, as is SOP for all campaign receipts. What is being said now is that the candidate, unlike all other donors, had an obligation to disclose also the source of the personal funds being loaned. As I said before, I had never heard of this wrinkle. That's what campaign lawyers are for, but people make mistakes.

Since Cruz disclosed the Goldman brokerage loan in his financial disclosures, there was clearly no intent to conceal. Someone on the campaign made a filing error on the FEC form. But since the underlying activities were entirely legal, quite normal campaign business, and disclosed elsewhere, this is a trivial matter that should end with a corrected filing.