This morning’s edition of the Boston Globe contained a report that “government documents filed by Mitt Romney and Bain Capital (BCSF) say Romney remained chief executive and chairman of the firm three years beyond the date he said he ceded control” bolstering the Obama campaign’s argument that Mr. Romney was responsible for outsourcing that occurred at Bain. The Globe article came just as the Romney campaign released a new ad describing the outsourcing claims as “dishonest.” Obama campaign spokeswoman Lis Smith responded with a statement saying, “Romney’s False Ad Is Based On His Big Bain Lie.”
“Mitt Romney’s ad is based on the false premise that he left Bain Capital in February 1999, an assertion that today’s Boston Globe and official documents filed with the SEC and the State of Massachusetts demonstrate is just not true,” Ms. Smith said. “The fact is that Romney, despite his big Bain lie, served as president and CEO of his corporate buyout firm until three years later and is responsible for the American jobs that were shipped overseas during that period.”
Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul countered the Globe article with a statement of her own labeling the Globe story “inaccurate.”
“The article is not accurate. As Bain Capital has said, as Governor Romney has said, and as has been confirmed by independent fact checkers multiple times, Governor Romney left Bain Capital in February of 1999 to run the Olympics and had no input on investments or management of companies after that point,” Ms. Saul said.
Ms. Saul’s statement didn’t specifically address the documents uncovered by the Globe, which include documents Bain Capital filed with the SEC and a “Massachusetts financial disclosure form Romney filed in 2003 states that he still owned 100 percent of Bain Capital in 2002.”
Obama for America Deputy Campaign Manager Stephanie Cutter also issued a statement on the Globe story saying it put Mr. Romney “at the center of responsibility for troubling investments involving outsourcing and bankruptcies” that he claimed it was “dishonest” for the Obama campaign to tar him with in his ad. Ms. Cutter also said the report raises questions about another one of the Obama campaign’s favored topics–Mr. Romney’s failure to disclose more than a year of his tax returns.
“It also raises serious questions about why he misrepresented the date of his ‘departure,’ and whether he is concealing his tax returns because there is still more about this period and beyond that he doesn’t want people to know,” Ms. Cutter said. “It’s time for Mitt Romney to come clean so that the American people can make their own judgments about his record and his motivations.”
