Ted Cruz reminds crowd of David Dewhurst’s Communist claim

In a Republican U.S. Senate debate in Austin on Feb. 1, 2012, candidate Ted Cruz brought up a claim we’d checked, as recapped by Austin’s KVUE-TV.

In the debate, hosted by the Texas Association of Business, Cruz and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst clashed over the issue of trade tariffs, with Cruz revisiting his accusation of Dewhurst calling him a “Communist,” KVUE reported.

“When I spoke out at the time and said I would have voted against the tariff bill, Lt. Gov. Dewhurst’s campaign sent out an email calling me a ‘red Chinese Communist,’ ” Cruz said.

Cruz was speaking to a pair of Dewhurst campaign emails we looked into in October 2011.

We concluded then that it’s reasonable to take the subject line of one of the Dewhurst emails as calling Cruz a Chinese Communist — and the other cited email similarly depicted Cruz as siding with China over the United States, yet did not include the “red” label. We rated Cruz’s characterization Mostly True. See details in the fact check, posted to the right.