Sonny Weaver Jr. is a fictional character in the 2014 movie Draft Day. He’s the general manager of a team in the National Football League - the Cleveland Browns. One of Sonny’s responsibilities is making the decision on who to select on draft day from among the hundreds of college football players who have declared their intent to enter the NFL’s draft. Sonny’s team acquires the very first pick in the draft, and much of the movie revolves around Sonny’s decision on who to select. Sonny likes a player named Vontae Mack, but once his team acquires the first pick in the draft, he is suddenly in a position to acquire the much-hyped quarterback, Bo Callahan. At that point, Sonny tasks the team’s security director who is also a detective to find out as much as he can about Bo Callahan’s character.
The detective later returns and tells Sonny a story he’s heard about Bo. A general manager (GM) of another football team that was considering drafting Bo sent Bo a playbook to read with a one-hundred dollar bill taped to the last page of the playbook. During a subsequent interview, when the GM asks Bo whether he’s read the playbook or not, Bo says he did but doesn’t mention finding the hundred-dollar bill, so the general manager knows he lied about reading the playbook. At that point, the GM confronts Bo about the hundred-dollar bill and Bo replies, “Oh yeah, good one guys. Good one,” sticking with the story that he’d read the playbook, but just forgot about the money.
“He’s the only guy who lied about reading the playbook,” the detective tells Sonny Weaver Jr., “and then had the balls to lie about the lie.”
I was thinking about that movie clip yesterday after reading a New York Times investigative article that revealed that GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz had secured a million-dollar ($1,000,000) loan from Goldman Sachs in 2012 to help finance his campaign to become a U.S. Senator for Texas. Cruz failed to disclose that loan on campaign finance reports that are required by law to be filed with the Federal Election Commission. When confronted with the evidence of his failure, Cruz responded by saying that his failure to report the loan was an “inadvertent oversight,” as if owing somebody a million bucks is one of those things a person is likely to forget when filling out a federal election document that asks if you owe anybody money, and if so, to who and how much.
If a person pulls that crap when trying to get a bank loan, that’s called bank fraud; if they mail that form it’s also mail fraud, and if they electronically file that form, that’s wire fraud. Hundreds of guys are currently sitting in federal prisons for committing those same offenses, and most of them claimed “inadvertent oversight,” too. Perhaps their mistake was not running for president.
The irony of Cruz’ loan is that his wife worked for Goldman Sachs, one of Wall Street’s largest banks and venture capital firms, and Cruz campaigned on a populist platform decrying Wall Street’s back-room deals between big-money interests that played a central role in causing the Great Recession of 2008. It sure wouldn’t have looked good to Texas voters during his campaign if it was discovered that Cruz made his own back-room deal with Wall Street – talk about hypocrisy - so Cruz “inadvertently” omitted mention of the million dollar loan on his federal election disclosure form.
Now, Cruz lies about the lie with his claim of inadvertent oversight. All I can say is that the guy has some set of balls!
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