When Mitt Romney left the Massachusetts governor’s office in early 2007, he and his aides “erased much of the internal documentation of Romney’s four-year tenure as governor“, wiping emails off state servers and using campaign funds to buy and destroy hard drives from their computers.
While Romney supplied 23 years of tax returns to the McCain campaign in 2008 as part of the vetting for a short list of possible vice-presidential picks, he’s released only his 2010 tax return (and not all of that) to the public this year, and says he won’t release any older returns.
Romney has refused to call on his former employees at Bain Capital to release correspondence and minutes of Bain board meetings that could support (or not) Romney’s claim that he had nothing to do with managing Bain after Feb. 1999.
And now it turns out that the “complete transparency” Mitt Romney promised when he took charge of running the Salt Lake City Olympics turns out to be something more like “complete stonewalling”:
“Salt Lake Organizing Committee officials confirmed to the Globe that most administrative records were destroyed in the months after the Games concluded.
Romney did not oversee the destruction of organizing committee documents. That task fell to Fraser Bullock (no relation to Kenneth Bullock), the committee’s chief operating officer and a former Romney colleague at Bain Capital, who took over as the Games’ chief executive when Romney left to run for governor of Massachusetts.”
(Otherwise known as “taking one for the boss”.)
It’s one thing to be cautious about one’s public record. It’s another to spend over a decade organizing and running a wide-ranging conspiracy to destroy and/or cover up any document that might prove to be an obstacle towards seizing the most powerful office in the nation.
Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/