Ted Cruz reacts after his father is dragged into Trump hush money trial over fake JFK assassin photo

Texas Senator Ted Cruz has reacted to his father being dragged into Donald Trump’s hush money trial over a fake JFK assassination photo published by the National Enquirer.

Details of the tabloid’s inner workings were revealed on Tuesday when former publisher of the Enquirer, David Pecker, testified about its role in “catch-and-kill” schemes that buried stories about Mr Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The supermarket scandal sheet also ran lurid headlines about Mr Cruz, a 2016 Republican rival to Mr Trump. Among the stories was one based on highly questionable evidence that his Cuban immigrant father, Rafael Cruz, was linked to the late president John F Kennedy‘s assassin.

The magazine published a photo that allegedly showed Rafael Cruz with Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans in 1963 distributing and handing out pro-Fidel Castro pamphlets.

When asked about Mr Pecker’s trial testimony on Capitol Hill, Mr Cruz said that he was “not interested in revisiting ancient history”.

During the 2016 campaign, Mr Cruz had dismissed the Enquirer as “a tabloid full of garbage”, according to The Daily Mail.

“It is a tabloid smear, and it is a smear that has come from Donald Trump and his henchmen,” Mr Cruz said at the time.

Asked by the prosecution about the Enquirer’s efforts to serve as Mr Trump’s “eyes and ears”, buying up the exclusive rights to hostile news stories about the candidate to bury them while pushing disingenuous attacks on his rivals, Mr Pecker explained: “[Mr Trump’s personal attorney] Michael Cohen would call me and say we would like for you to run a negative article on a certain – let’s say it’s on Ted Cruz.

“He would send me information about Ted Cruz or about Ben Carson or Marco Rubio, and that was the