New filing shows what Cunningham earned from company at heart of Tillis attacks
Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Cal Cunningham earned less than $11,000 in the three-plus months he worked as a legal consultant for his former company, according to a financial disclosure document filed with the U.S. Senate on Thursday.
Cunningham is no longer working as a consultant with WasteZero, the Raleigh-based waste company where he served as general counsel for seven years until March 20. The documents show he stopped consulting work in June.
Incumbent Sen. Thom Tillis and his campaign have made Cunningham’s status with WasteZero — and whether he benefited from the Raleigh-based company’s Paycheck Protection Program federal loan — one of their top issues.
Candidates and senators are required to file the form. This filing covers January 2019 through July of this year and includes income, assets and employment positions. Tillis filed his most recent form earlier this week.
Cunningham earned more than $285,000 as the company’s vice president and general counsel in the 18 months covered in the report.
The Senate race in North Carolina is considered a toss-up and is one of the key elections in determining who has control of the chamber in January. Cunningham has led in nearly every poll conducted since the beginning of June.
The Payment Protection Program was passed as part of a $2 trillion bipartisan federal coronavirus relief package, which was signed into law on March 27. It provided forgivable loans to small businesses to keep employees on their payroll.
WasteZero received a loan on May 3 of between $1 million and $2 million and used it to retain 115 employees.
Cunningham’s campaign said he left the company’s payroll on March 20, and later said he was available for consulting work with WasteZero. His electronic signature appeared on a form the company filed in Massachusetts dated March 31, which was first reported by The Charlotte Observer.
“I have been available to them, to help with things since then, to transition to my sucessor the work that I had been doing. I was aware they were applying for a PPP loan, but I was not involved,” Cunningham said on July 9.
Cunningham, as a contractor, would not have been eligible to receive any of the PPP funds WasteZero received. The company’s CEO told PolitiFact that Cunningham “was not involved in the application for the PPP funds and did not benefit from them.”
But Tillis and his allies have repeatedly called out Cunningham, saying he criticized the program and his company benefited from it.
“I supported the Paycheck Protection Program because it helped save one million NC jobs. Cal Cunningham criticized it while his company benefitted (sic),” Tillis tweeted on July 7.
Cunningham has said several times that he supports the program, but added that the program had left behind small businesses, especially Black- and Latino-owned businesses. He said leaving behind those businesses harmed communities. He also called for more oversight of the program.
Other politicians also have made similar critiques about the program, including Tillis, who worried that smaller businesses don’t have resources needed to get the documents together to apply for the loans.
Republican attacks on Cunningham around the PPP have grown sharper, with one GOP ad accusing Cunningham of directly receiving money from the program. The ad was briefly taken down from North Carolina TV stations and replaced with softer language.
Earlier this week, the campaign released a new digital ad on the issue. Tillis, in an interview with Spectrum News earlier this month, called for WasteZero to “lay out the facts of the application.”
“They can just simply release the details of how they spent the money and where Cal was at the time,” Tillis said in the interview.
On Thursday, the campaign said Cunningham should answer how much he made from WasteZero since leaving the company’s payroll. Tillis also tweeted a similar message alongside the new digital ad.
The answer is in the documents filed Thursday: $10,950.
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This story was originally published August 13, 2020 at 9:46 PM with the headline "New filing shows what Cunningham earned from company at heart of Tillis attacks."
