Boehner then sued McDermott, seeking punitive damages for violations of his First Amendment rights.Īnd who did Boehner hire for his legal team? None other than a fresh-faced Cruz, who at the time had finished two clerkships and was working with a law firm in Washington, D.C. McDermott presented the tape to media outlets, including The New York Times. A Florida couple intercepted the conversation from a police scanner and recorded it while Boehner spoke on a cellphone, then gave the tape to McDermott, who at the time was the chief Democrat on the House Ethics Committee. The call was about then-Speaker Newt Gingrich, who later admitted to a wrongdoing in an ongoing House ethics subcommittee investigation. The case stemmed from an illegally intercepted telephone call that involved Boehner and other GOP leaders in December 1996. Boehner was suing Democratic Representative Jim McDermott of Washington state for allegedly defying wiretapping laws, according to The Washington Post. It was the late 1990s: Boehner was a congressman from Ohio, and Cruz was a rising legal star who had clerked for Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist. Despite Cruz's proclamation, their love story-er, rivalry-dates back almost two decades, before Cruz was a senator and ahead of Boehner serving as the country's top Republican leader. The truth of the matter is I don't know the man," he said.īut that's not true. Before a rally in Indiana Thursday, Cruz told reporters he hasn't spoken more than 50 words to Boehner throughout his entire life. The Texas senator, who is deeply (and outrightly) disliked by many of his colleagues on Capitol Hill, encouraged voters to support Republican front-runner Donald Trump if they are content with the legacy of Boehner-who left Congress last fall as the least popular House speaker in three decades. On Thursday, Cruz, 45, hit back at the ex-speaker, saying he had revealed his "inner-Trump," in that he pretends to be a Washington outsider. When Ted Cruz and John Boehner passively exchanged harsh words about each other this week, starting with the former House speaker calling the senator "Lucifer in the flesh" and leading the presidential hopeful to quickly fire back, neither quite mentioned one key point: that the two had worked on a legal case together nearly 20 years ago-a little known fact of their thorny history.
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