Game Changer: Obama’s Unrelenting Assault on W. Mitt Romney’s Bain Secret

Last updated on February 8th, 2013 at 09:17 pm

The Obama campaign put this hard hitter out Friday – a Friday the 13th I’m sure W. Mitt Romney will remember for a very, very long time as Game Changer day.

Watch here:

To get more stories like this, subscribe to our newsletter The Daily.

The more everyone finds out about W. Mitt Romney’s finances, the more questions they have. Perhaps that’s why he’s hiding as much as he thinks he can get away with.

Yesterday, The Boston Globe reported that Romney was still running Bain Capital two years after he claims he left the firm, directly contradicting his campaign’s denial that he was involved in deals that led to layoffs, bankruptcies, and American jobs getting shipped overseas.

Either Romney filed false SEC statements or he’s making false statements to the American people now.

President Obama started off with Ampad ads against Romney for the job killing. The ads goaded Romney into responding, at which point Romney claimed the ads were a lie because he wasn’t at Bain then. FactCheck and the Washington Post took Romney at his word, because he had filed a disclosure form stating that he was gone after 1999.

Then, SEC filings started leaking that showed Romney appeared to be still involved at Bain through 2002, with David Corn of Mother Jones revealing that Romney was on a Bain “management committee” during these years, and also showing that Romney was signing documents for Bain. In addition, yet another company, Stericycle, filed with the SEC listing Romney as an active participant. Talking Points Memo provided more documents to call Romney’s claim into question.

Thursday all Hell broke loose with The Boston Globe’s story, followed up quickly by articles at Politico and Huffington Post with still more filings and discrepancies. Ironically, also occurring on Thursday was Mitt Romney’s huge roll out of an ad calling President Obama a liar for the outsourcing attacks, which appeared to be proven true on Thursday with the Globe story.

Recalling that FactCheck said they were calling Obama wrong on his earlier Ampad ads because if Romney’s disclosure was wrong that would be a federal felony, soon the media began asking if Romney had committed a felony or was lying to the American people. It’s one or the other, they said.

Within hours of that narrative developing on Friday, the Obama campaign put out the above ad while Romney scrambled to recapture the narrative via mainstream media appearances in pre-taped interviews. At least something finally drove Romney out of his comfort zone enough to go on TV news…

But those interviews failed to achieve his goal, as headlines from even CNN put his claim that Obama’s accusations are “false” in quote marks, because the candidate failed to prove that the accusations were false. Instead, Romney relied on smearing the messenger, saying (but providing no proof) he left Bain years earlier than federal records indicate and trying to explain that he was listed as President, CEO and owned all of the stock but he wasn’t involved and oh, Obama is trying to “kill Romney”.

He produced nothing to refute the SEC filings piling up against him.

BainGate is still developing and it’s not pretty.

Sarah Jones

Listen to Sarah on the PoliticusUSA Pod on The Daily newsletter podcast here.

Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.

Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Connect with Sarah on Post,  Mastodon @PoliticusSarah@Journa.Host, & Twitter.