so it s going to be difficult. gregg: was it used to try to hide a personal embarrass from the time his wife or to protect his campaign. kirsten, edwards claims that that the money was a personal gift and not a campaign contribution and in fact gift taxes were paid on on it and much of it was not funneled traditional accounts. is that a problem for prosecutors? the defense has to be careful with those claims. those things are going to infuriate a jury. when the people of the united states believe campaign finances have been changed, they don t want funneling into third party accounts and calling it different things. that is going to be make the jurors mad at the defense. gregg: the indictment, it says the donors or two of them
i know you ve been digging, i know very few other people have. these returns are gigantic and complicated and it s difficult to get through them. what is the biggest mystery you found? because i think normally when you look at tax returns like this, what you come out of it with is more questions than answers. i got lots of questions, lawrence. in this case, anybody who reads a personal finance magazine, money, smart money, they would think you could only give $13,000 a year, $26,000 for a married couple to each of your children, and a lifetime maximum of $2 million. but the romney campaign acknowledged to reuters that no gift taxes were paid. now, they didn t do anything illegal, they didn t do anythin improper. this is the scandal of the law, and how romney s positioned to take advantage of it, in the way that most people would not be. and he was able to pass this $100 million.
cay johnston, a professor at syracuse law school. i know you ve been digging, i know very few other people have. these returns are gigantic and complicated and it s difficult to get through them. what is the biggest mystery you found? because i think normally when you look at tax returns like this, what you come out of it with is more questions than answer answers. i got lots of questions, lawrence. in this case, anybody who reads a personal finance magazine, money, smart money, they would think you could only give $13,000 a year, $26,000 for a married couple to each of your children, and a lifetime maximum of $2 million. but the romney campaign acknowledged to reuters that no gift taxes were paid. now, they didn t do anything illegal, they didn t do anything improp improper.
all right, show time i was going to say, it s going to be a hip-hop morning here. get it started. let s get it started. welcome, everybody. as i mentioned we re coming to you from the diner. every morning we tell you what we re eating. so i m going to tell you what we re eating, i got to read this one. specialty of the house. this is called the kroek and dagger, two eggs over easy with bacon or ham, sandwiched between french loaf smothered in sauce, cheese, served with home fries or grits. coming in at 27 can i hold it up for you? 27,000 calories right here. and i m going to put that in front of our guest panelist today who is joining us is congressman aaron shock. he s the republican from the state of illinois who i saw your picture on the front of men s health. i m not eating a whole lot of those. that s not how you get abs like the congressman has. i should mention he is joining our panel and women have all been on twitter to have you here today. appreciate you
toast, bacon, ham, sausage, chicken sausage, wheat or rye toast, coffee, tea, hot chocolate, no substitutions. rollout out. take you out to your car and put you on a treadmill. this morning i m going to stick with the tater tots because they re easy to eat to anchor a show. hello, everybody. cnn s political analyst roland martin is with us this morning. it s a bad start if i can t get through roland s name. david frum is back with us. nice to have you in person. chatting by satellite. and also this morning, norquist is joining us, president of americans for tax reform. you re going to be our tax expert this morning as we sort through mitt romney s taxes. it s nice to have you. thanks for being with us. mitt romney we know now officially released his tax returns. we re expecting that in about 90 minutes. but there is a preview. the preview is roughly 550 pages long. romney made $21.6 million in 2010. paid over $3 million in taxes. and tesktive tax rate as we mentioned is 1