AUSTIN, Texas — House Republicans’ campaign arm launched scathing attacks on two vulnerable Democrats in contentious races for congressional districts on the Texas border with Mexico.
The National Republican Congressional Committee debuted 30-second ads early Tuesday that smear Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez. The English and Spanish ads accused both Democratic Party politicians of being in bed with Mexican cartels that smuggle drugs and people across the border — accusations they immediately denied and slammed as “desperate” last-ditch efforts to destroy them a week out from the election.
“Cassy Garcia has resurfaced a 10-year-old story and launched a blatantly false ad just 7 days before Election Day in a desperate attempt to smear Congressman Cuellar’s reputation and save her losing campaign,” Cuellar’s campaign for Texas’s 28th District said in a statement Tuesday about his Republican opponent.
The NRCC’s attack on Gonzalez described him as “shady.”
“These negative TV ads Republicans have been launched against me are absurd and completely false,” Gonzalez said in a statement shared with the Washington Examiner. “Unfortunately, my opponent and Trump’s Republican National Committee have taken these cases and distorted the facts to their benefit in an attempt to affect the outcome of the election.”
The NRCC claimed that Gonzalez invested a quarter of a million dollars in a Chinese bank, paid a blogger who wrote “sexist and anti-immigrant insults about Mayra Flores, then doctored a photo to distort her face,” and made millions of dollars by legally representing a Mexican cartel member.
Gonzalez, who is leaving Texas’s 15th District to run for the 34th District, denied the ad’s claims, including that he hired a blogger to attack his GOP opponent. Flores won a special election in June following the departure of Rep. Filemon Vela Jr. (D-TX).
“During the early years of my career as a lawyer, due to a shortage of federal public defenders in our region, federal judges then asked local attorneys to take on criminal cases in the Southern District of Texas,” Gonzalez said. “I have never been reprimanded by the State Bar of Texas in my 20-plus years as an attorney. I also never hired a blogger to write anything derogatory about my opponent. I do not have and have never had a bank account in China.”
The narrator in the NRCC video on Cuellar said he “cozied up to the cartels’ cronies, worked hand-in-hand with this one to advance their agenda. Henry Cuellar’s still in Congress. No wonder the border’s wide open — because there’s dirty politicians on both banks of the river.”
The nine-term congressman reportedly had received a $1,000 donation from a woman who was married to Antonio Pena Arguelles, a Mexican citizen and legal U.S. resident whom U.S. federal agents arrested in 2012 on suspicion of funneling millions of dollars from the Los Zetas cartel to high-ranking Mexican officials.
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The conduit had also donated money to Martin Cuellar, the congressman’s brother and sheriff of Webb County, located within Cuellar’s district. Both Cuellars said they gave the donations to charity or returned the money. Pena Arguelles was later sentenced to three years in prison.
“The Garcia campaign is trying to distract South Texas voters from the issues that matter,” Cuellar’s campaign said Tuesday. “Congressman Cuellar’s record securing the border speaks for itself. To the point that Mrs. Garcia has even acknowledged, ‘Congressman Cuellar has been strong on the border.’”
