Romneyland responds: 'This is nothing more than a quirk in the law'

Mitt Romney's press strategy Mitt Romney's campaign responds to the Boston Globe's report that three years after Romney claims he left Bain Capital, the firm was still identifying Romney as its sole owner and top corporate officer:

"Although Governor Romney was not involved with Bain Capital after he left to head the Winter Olympics in 1999, he was still listed on some technical filings," the official said. "This is nothing more than a quirk in the law. When Governor Romney took over the Olympics, he was not involved in the operations of any Bain Capital entity in any way. He was too busy working to make the Olympic Games among the most successful ever held."

So on the one hand Mitt Romney's campaign says Mitt Romney had nothing to do with Bain Capital whatsoever after February of 1999 ... and on the other hand his company continued to say that he was the sole owner and top corporate officer as late as 2002 and Romney himself signed key documents during that three year span. And the Romney campaign's explanation for this is that it's all just "a quirk in the law"?

I'm sorry, but that makes no sense. If Mitt Romney wasn't the top guy at Bain, then Bain shouldn't have listed him as the top guy. And if Romney was the top guy, then the campaign shouldn't have ever claimed he had completely separated himself from the firm in 1999. Obviously, we don't know if he was making day to day management decisions, but that isn't the point: The point is that unless Bain's SEC filings were false, Romney was Bain's top corporate officer, and the buck stopped with him. (Of course now, even though he continues to make $20 million a year from Bain, Romneyland pretends that he has no responsibility for anything the company ever does, unless they decide that it's something they want to take credit for.)

If this really were as simple as a quirk in the law, then why did Romney's campaign refuse to comment in the Globe's article? Clearly, it's because this isn't about "a quirk in the law." Compare what Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul says ...

"The article is not accurate," Romney press secretary Andrea Saul said in a statement. "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."

... with what one of her colleagues says in the same article:

In a conversation with POLITICO, Romney adviser Matt McDonald also said the Globe report was inaccurate. "Romney wasn't involved in any investment decisions," McDonald said. "He was on the SEC filings becasue he was still technically the owner, but hadn't transferred ownership to other partners."

Saul says that Romney left Bain Capital in February of 1999 ... but her colleague says Romney still owned the company. I don't know about you, but I can't reconcile the notion that Romney left Bain with the fact that he still owned it.

Moreover, it's worth asking why Romney still owned Bain in 2002. Presumably, he didn't know in 1999 that he was going to be elected governor in 2002. He probably didn't even know he was going to run. In fact, I'll bet he didn't even know whether or not he was going to return full-time to the company.

Sure, in hindsight, you might wonder why he didn't fully cut the cord in 1999, but the answer is almost certainly that he didn't cut the cord because he didn't know what his future was going to be.

But even if Mitt Romney had left Bain in February of 1999, even if he hadn't continued to earn eight-figure sums from the company he created, Romney still couldn't say that he had nothing to do with Bain's investments in outsourcing. Because in 1998, when he was still at the company, that's exactly what he did, investing millions in a Chinese company that helped U.S. companies outsource jobs. And the icing on the cake is that one of the entities he used to make that investment was a shell company with a Bermudan mailing address.