Conservative commentator George Will says,
“Look, what Mitt Romney has said is, he has released, and I quote, ‘all that’s necessary for people to understand something about my finances.’ Now, the ‘something’ is a pregnant word. And people are going to say the costs of not releasing the returns are clear, therefore, he must have calculated that there are higher costs in releasing them.”
The Boston Globe provided a glimmer of what might be wriggling under the rock of Romney’s returns. Romney has argued that he is not responsible for Bain’s post-1999 outsourcing orgy because he was no longer involved with Bain at that time. But the Globe revealed that Romney filed documents with the SEC showing that until 2002, he owned 100% of Bain Capital as
“sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president.”
He also drew a $100,000 salary. I think that counts as ‘involved.’
According to Politico, if this is true
“Romney would be guilty of a federal felony by certifying on federal financial disclosure forms that he left active management of Bain Capital in February 1999.”
The Romney campaign could easily make this whole problem go away by producing the individual who was the real CEO of Bain Capital from 1999 to 2002. So far, it has failed to do so, and there is no indication that such a person other than Mitt Romney exists.
Senior Romney campaign adviser Ed Gillespie attempted to swat the allegations away by saying that Romney had decided to
“retire retroactively.”
Seriously? That is the best the Romney campaign can come up with as an explanation for alleged perjury to the SEC, and getting caught in a whopping lie to the American people that deflates his entire argument for why voters should roll the dice on his candidacy? Their explanation is that he WAS the CEO of Bain Capital until 2002 during its outsourcing extravaganza but then he decided it would be fun if he had NOT been the CEO of his baby, Vulture Capital while it ravenously gutted American industry.
How do they expect the Cleveland steelworker or Ft. Lauderdale single mother who will decide this election to relate to that? Oh yes, when Romney closed my plant, I just applied for three years of unemployment retroactively. When my deadbeat ex left me with two kids, I just collected a few years of food stamps retroactively. Easy as pie! Romney may know more than anyone alive how to suck a business dry, but he knows nothing about relating his executive experience to the common rabble.
According to decades of precedent, presidential candidates publish at least a decade of tax filings. Romney has released 1 year and did so kicking and screaming. Romney’s refusal to release his returns demonstrates that he would conduct a secretive, opaque administration, reward his secret filthy rich allies and wield the presidential pen to sign laws that reduce the taxes on his own personal fortune and increase his family’s luxuries. The press is striving to take a candle into the closet of his finances and have found a forest of skeletons dangling in there. Even a cursory examination of his past has led to allegations of a felony as he may have defrauded the government and his investors. What else lurks in the shadows of Romney’s financial past? Will we ever know? What is it that is so much worse than the mystery? What IS Romney hiding?
View All
™ 2006-2013 ©