Ted Cruz reacts after his father is dragged into Trump hush money trial over fake JFK assassin photo

Texas senator reluctant to revisit ‘ancient history’ after ex-’National Enquirer’ publisher takes stand at Trump trial

Texas Senator Ted Cruz has reacted to his father being dragged into Donald Trump’s hush money trial over a fake JFK assassination photo published by the National Enquirer.

Details of the tabloid’s inner workings were revealed on Tuesday when former publisher of the Enquirer, David Pecker, testified about its role in “catch-and-kill” schemes that buried stories about Mr Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The supermarket scandal sheet also ran lurid headlines about Mr Cruz, a 2016 Republican rival to Mr Trump. Among the stories was one based on highly questionable evidence that his Cuban immigrant father, Rafael Cruz, was linked to the late president John F Kennedy‘s assassin.

The magazine published a photo that allegedly showed Rafael Cruz with Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans in 1963 distributing and handing out pro-Fidel Castro pamphlets.

When asked about Mr Pecker’s trial testimony on Capitol Hill, Mr Cruz said that he was “not interested in revisiting ancient history”.

During the 2016 campaign, Mr Cruz had dismissed the Enquirer as “a tabloid full of garbage”, according to The Daily Mail.

“It is a tabloid smear, and it is a smear that has come from Donald Trump and his henchmen,” Mr Cruz said at the time.

Asked by the prosecution about the Enquirer’s efforts to serve as Mr Trump’s “eyes and ears”, buying up the exclusive rights to hostile news stories about the candidate to bury them while pushing disingenuous attacks on his rivals, Mr Pecker explained: “[Mr Trump’s personal attorney] Michael Cohen would call me and say we would like for you to run a negative article on a certain – let’s say it’s on Ted Cruz.

“He would send me information about Ted Cruz or about Ben Carson or Marco Rubio, and that was the basis for our story. We would embellish it from there.”

Ted Cruz speaks during a news conference about the US southern border at the Capitol in Washington, DC, on 6 February 2024 (Getty)

With Mr Trump looking on in Judge Juan Merchan’s courtroom, his old media ally said of the concocted story about Mr Cruz’s father: “We mashed the photos and the different picture with [President Kennedy’s killer] Lee Harvard Oswald.

“We mashed the two together. That’s how that story was prepared – created, I would say.”

Other Enquirer headlines from the period attacking Mr Cruz included: “Ted Cruz Sex Scandal – 5 Secret Mistresses”, “Ted Cruz Shamed By Porn Star” and “Perv Ted Cruz Caught Cheating”.

However, it was not just the tabloid media that subjected the senator to bad taste attacks during the campaign: Mr Trump himself notoriously tweeted out a picture post insinuating that Mr Cruz’s wife, Heidi Cruz, was less attractive than his spouse Melania Trump, which understandably infuriated the Texan before he ultimately suspended his campaign and endorsed Mr Trump anyway, courageously overlooking the personal insult to a loved one for the greater good of the GOP.

Former US president Donald Trump watches as prosecutor Joshua Steinglass questions David Pecker before Justice Juan Merchan during Trump's criminal trial in Manhattan on Tuesday 23 April (Reuters)

Mr Cruz’s fellow Republican senators Lindsey Graham and JD Vance followed his lead on Tuesday in attempting to downplay the significance of Mr Pecker’s testimony, which also touched on efforts to suppress stories alleging that Mr Trump had an illegitimate child by a Trump Tower maid and an affair with Playboy model Karen McDougal.

After a day’s recess on Wednesday, Mr Pecker is expected to return to the stand on Thursday and is likely to reach the Stormy Daniels chapter of his story, the basis for Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s 34-account indictment of Mr Trump for allegedly falsifying business records to conceal a $130,000 hush money payment made to her in exchange for her silence.

Mr Trump denies the affair and has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges he faces, insisting the entire case is a “scam” and a “witch hunt” orchestrated by his political enemies to impede his 2024 campaign for the White House, an argument he has made repeatedly to reporters outside court and on Truth Social in defiance of the gag order placed upon him by the judge, which could yet cost him $10,000 in fines.