A brewing, public and increasingly ugly spat between Karl Rove, a top political adviser to the Bush White Houses, and Ted Cruz, a Texas senator eying his own administration, boiled over as both accused the other of lying this weekend.
The latest increment of the feud includes Cruz releasing six-year-old emails between the pair that his campaign believe proves his point.
“Ted Cruz sets record straight with Karl Rove,” the headline of a Cruz press release late Sunday read. “A Time for Truth isn’t just the name of Sen. Cruz’s new book,” it continued.
In the book to be released Tuesday, Cruz recounts his aborted bid for state attorney general in 2009 and his surprising success winning the support of George H.W. Bush, an elder statesman in Texas GOP circles. Cruz, who got his start in politics in the sprawling Bush political shop, requested a meeting with the former president and left with a $1,000 donation, according to reports of the book.
When Rove learned that Cruz, then Texas’ solicitor general running his first campaign, had won Bush’s support, Rove was upset. As Rove outlined in a post Sunday on Medium, he believed Cruz had not told Bush that Greg Abbott, the Republican incumbent attorney general, was still pondering running for reelection.
But as Cruz writes in his book — and supports in a series of emails released by his campaign as part of a reply to the Medium post — Rove actually had a different worry: that donors to the soon-to-be-built Bush library — who supported a Texas state representative considering running for attorney general himself — would be discouraged by seeing Bush choosing Cruz instead.
Abbott eventually decided to run for reelection, and neither the state representative nor Cruz chose to primary him.
Rove also indicated that Bush’s judgment had faded as he aged, according to an excerpt obtained by Breitbart News, which Rove emphatically denied Sunday. A spokesman for Bush declined to comment to CNN on the events late Sunday.
The two agreed to not draw attention to the Bush donation, but not before Rove issued a stern warning to Cruz, Breitbart reported.
“He implied that if I made any news about Bush 41’s support, then Bush 43 would endorse my opponent and come out publicly for him—a threat that was fairly striking given that I had devoted four years of my life to working as hard as I could helping to elect Bush and serving in his administration,” Cruz writes.
The squabble between Cruz, who won his Senate seat three years later, and Rove, President George W. Bush’s consigliore, shows just how far Cruz has drifted from the Bush network that gave him his political legs. Some Texas Republicans have privately expressed surprise at how quickly the up-and-comer Cruz turned on the business-friendly Bush circles and seized the mantle of the tea party movement.
Now, of course, Cruz is confronting that network head-on: He is running for president against Jeb Bush, who is building a fundraising juggernaut by drawing on the family network that revolutionized how candidates raise money by seeking bundled contributions.
Nevertheless, publicly antagonizing Rove comes with its own risks. A Rove-started super PAC and political nonprofit group are some of the most influential outside spenders in Republican politics, and Rove remains a powerbroker in establishment donor circles.
And he is clearly aggravated.
“One piece of advice I offered was that he should stop describing himself as the ‘next Marco Rubio,’ since he did not have Senator Rubio’s outstanding legislative record of accomplishments as speaker of the Florida House of Representatives,” Rove wrote Sunday, praising a competing presidential contender.
“I am accustomed to being criticized for others’ political benefit, but am disappointed in how Senator Cruz decided to raise the name of one of the finest presidents our country has ever known, President George H.W. Bush.”
Cruz, too, has dug in his heels.
“I understood that my recounting in my book A Time for Truth the threats he made in the 2009 Texas Attorney General race—and the disparaging remarks he made about President George H.W. Bush—would cause him some discomfort,” Cruz said in a statement accompanying the emails.
“But I never imagined that his response would be a straight-out falsehood. It’s disappointing; this is why people are so cynical about politics, because too many people are willing to lie.”