Tillis Hammers Cunningham For PPP Hypocrisy In Interview With Spectrum News

August 6th, 2020

Calls On WasteZero To Be Transparent About Their Use Of PPP Loan

Cunningham Continues To Duck Questions On Compensation From Company

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – In an interview yesterday on Spectrum News’ Capital Tonight, Senator Thom Tillis hammered Cal Cunningham for hypocritically criticizing the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and then lying to cover it up. In light of Cunningham’s insistence that the PPP be more transparent, Tillis also called on Cunningham’s company, WasteZero, to release their PPP application as well as any other documents detailing Cunningham’s work for them and how they spent their PPP loan.

In a separate interview with Capital Tonight yesterday, Cunningham struggled to defend his PPP lies and hypocrisy, changing his story once again and refusing to say when he was last paid by WasteZero.

Watch Tillis’ interview HERE.

TRANSCRIPT

TIM BOYUM: Alright, so you dropped a new ad today about Cal Cunningham and about the PPP loans. Tell us about that and why you think this is important for voters to know about.

TILLIS: Well if Cal Cunningham is going to criticize the Paycheck Protection Program, which has benefitted tens of thousands of businesses and saved hundreds of thousands of jobs in North Carolina, he might have wanted to mention that his own business that he’s a senior executive at, was actually applying for the Paycheck Protection Program at the same time. And then after he was caught doing that he said he was no longer with the firm. That proved to be untrue. And then later he said he wasn’t aware that they were applying for the loan. Cal said something about wanting transparency, maybe we can hear more about what his business did with the loan once they got it.

BOYUM: So the NRSC had to change their ad. WasteZero says he left their payroll before the PPP was law. He was not involved and did not benefit. So do you believe that WasteZero is also lying about this then?

TILLIS: Well I don’t know. They can do that just by laying out the facts of the application. But that’s the interesting thing about the hypocrisy of some of our news outlets in North Carolina. There’s an ad up against me that’s been fact-checked absolutely false and they’re still playing it. So they seem to pick and choose based on what ads they really want to get on the air. We can get to the bottom of it just by simply having WasteZero fully disclose. We knew about it because every Paycheck Protection loan is published. People can know what businesses got it. They can just simply release the details of how they spent the money and where Cal was at the time.