capital, he said i m not going to return to my part time or full time status. instead, i m going to retroactively elect to not come back. this is really a slight of hand the president and his campaign are running as if governor romney were show in charge of bain. the boston globe who wrote a book on governor romney said he left in february 1999, i think this is more of a political statement. the slight of hand is not obama s, but it is romney s because if you retire, you retire. you put the date out there. you cease to be paid, but when you retroactively retire, that means you extend beyond the date and you, you ve got some gray area here. don t you understand why the rest of us find that a bit fudging of the facts? governor romney was the one shareholder as we know, but of course, he did not have any
twitse twitsersphere on yesterday. something that he did between february 1999 and 2002, it s only going further this story and keep the romney campaign on the defensive. on the issue of tax returns, mitt romney has been quite defensive. he said this this morning. john mccain ran for president and released two years of tax returns. john kerry ran for president. his wife how has hurricandreds millions of dollars, she never released her tax returns. the obama people keep wanting more to distort and be dishonest about. this is nothing new. he didn t release tax returns when running for governor in 2002. will this issue die or become an issue for the campaign? i think the obama campaign is going to be able to invoke this anytime they want to. anytime there s bad news in the
basically gone from bain february 1999 and never came back. everybody s saying that. t the new york times, washington post fact checkers who s a big democrat. and bring in sam stein as well. go ahead. saying sam, there are people that are lining things up here. i m not suggesting that romney campaign or mitt romney may not be telling the truth four, five days later. but it s been a long, bumpy road to get here. just the out and out denials to now saying that he retroactively retired. it seems dan, for once we won t say he runs the mitt romney campaign, but other than dan, there s been some sloppy campaign work coming out of boston, hasn t there? yeah, and i think it reflects
obama has a 2.5 lead over romney now. and today the romney campaign hastily arranged interviews with all the major networks. late this afternoon, romney talked to nbc s peter alexander. the president s campaign has been, i think, outrageous in mark making the kinds of charges they have. the attacks are beneath the dignity of the presidency. i want to clarify this. after february 1999 you never attended a single 3450e9ing for bain, a business meeting, even by phone attended a meeting regarding bain or bain-controlled entities? you have asked quite a few questions there. so let s go through. i didn t involve myself in any way with bain capital s enterprise after february of 1999. not participating in a single meeting either in person or by phone? i don t recall a single meeting or single participation in a investment decision by bain or personnel decision. rick, your campaign, newt gingrich brought this up in primary season and he was criticized.
well, you know, he has the option of saying, i departed, it was chaotic and it took us two, three years to sort things out. but that s not what he s saying. he s saying that he had nothing to do when i was the first to report that he signed documents, he signedthem. it wasn t just that his name was there, he signed documents that enabled a $75 million deal to go through. this is months after he supposedly left the company. he declared on his financial disclosure form, i ll have a story about this in an hour or so and i ll put the link on my twitter feed, but he signed a financial disclosure statement saying that in no way, not in any way was he involved in bain operations after february 1999. but there are these examples again and again of him signing records. now that s being involved. i m not saying he s running things day to day as the boston globe guy said, but he was involved. the big thing again is he s not going to be able to put this behind him. my story yesterday about h