Replies

Cruz and his wife are NOT outsiders. They both had jobs in the Bush admin. Heidi has held Wall Street jobs and has been a member of the CFR and co-authored the North American Union paper.

Here is some info on Neil Bush for those too young to remember.

NEIL BUSH. In 1990, federal regulators filed a $200-million lawsuit against Neil Bush and other officers of the Silverado Banking, accusing them of “gross negligence” contributing to its $1 billion collapse.1 “Our conclusion is that Silverado was the victim of sophisticated schemes and abuses by insiders and of gross negligence by its directors and outside professionals,” FDIC Senior Deputy General Counsel Douglas H. Jones said in a statement.2

Bush was reprimanded by the Office of Thrift Supervision for “multiple conflicts of interest” as a paid director of the S&L, including his approval of $132 million in loans from Silverado to two business partners, Bill Walters and Kenneth Good.3 Bush, in turn, had received $550,000 in salaries from a company funded by Walters and Good plus a $100,000 loan from Good that was subsequently forgiven.4 Walters and Good looted an estimated $330 million from Silverado; one Silverado director had shared instructions on how to establish family trusts to protect such secreted funds from repossession by the government.5

A top federal regulator testified to Congress that Washington officials postponed Silverado’s shutdown from October to December 1988, after George Bush’s presidential campaign was successfully culminated.6 The director of the Office of Thrift Supervision asked the Treasury Department to investigate whether political considerations caused the delay, but no such probe was conducted.7 Neil got off paying only $50,000 in a settlement of the $200 million federal suit against him other Silverado directors.8 He didn’t have to worry about his $250,000 legal bill, as Thomas Ashley, a friend of George Bush senior and the head of a banking association that was lobbying the federal government for bank deregulation, formed a legal defense fund to pay the bills.9

...

JEB BUSH. In 1987, Miguel Recarey, a longstanding business associate of Tampa Mafia boss Santos Trafficante, fled the U.S. under three indictments for labor racketeering, illegal wiretapping, and Medicare fraud.1 His firm, International Medical Centers (IMC), which was America’s largest health maintenance organization for the elderly and which had received $1 billion in Medicare funds, collapsed.2 Recarey’s HMO left $222 million in unpaid bills,3 and was suspected of up to $100 million in Medicare fraud.4 “IMC is the classic case of embezzlement of government funds,” said William Teich, who headed the U.S. Office of Labor Racketeering in Miami. Teich called it a “bust-out operation” where money was “drained out the back door” and disappeared down “a black hole.”5

But in 1985, Recarey had faced a major obstacle to building his Medicare empire: a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) regulation that restricted an HMO to drawing no more than 50% of its revenue from Medicare.6 Jeb Bush came to the rescue: he called both HHS Secretary Margaret Heckler and a top aide, C. McLain Haddow and successfully convinced them to waive the regulation for Recarey, Haddow testified to Congress.7 Bush’s lobbying of HHS took place during the same period that top-level Republican lobbyists whom Recarey had hired for $1 million were also courting HHS for the waiver.8 Bush said that said he did not recall making any calls to Heckler or Haddow, but confirmed that he made one call on Recarey’s behalf to Haddow’s assistant, to secure Recarey a “fair hearing” within HHS.9