or nonresident of massachusetts. but all of that, he said, how are you going to explain doing that? he said it was all other people s mistakes. the reporter he talked to in 2000 who noted that mr. romney had declared his utah home his primary residence, well, mr. romney said that must have been a mistake on the reporter s part. he told the massachusetts state ballot commission, quote, i have met with that reporter at least 100 times over the last three years and i don t recall a specific conversation about my residence in utah. that reporter got a subpoena to appear in massachusetts and testify as to whether or not mr. romney told her that, and the paper resisted that subpoena. in terms of the tax break that mr. romney got on his utah house for being a full-time resident of utah, he blamed a clerk in the tax assessor s office in utah saying he had never asked for that tax break. somebody accidentally gask gave it to him and accidentally saved him $54,000. the county assessor took the h
could prove it because he filed his taxes as a massachusetts resident all those years. that s what he said was in his taxes. that was not what was in his taxes. and he seems to have known it at the time even as he was making public claims to the contrary. when he finally got caught out in june of that year, he admitted a few months earlier when he decided to run for governor, earlier that spring, he had started the process of changing those returns. mr. romney had not filed as a resident of massachusetts. he said he did, but he didn t. he misled the public about it the whole time, and he misled reporters who were trying to get to the truth about it. quote, earlier in the week, mr. romney rejected a request by the boston globe for copies of his tax returns with financial information redacted but his residential status visible. they insisted the gop candidate had filed his returns as a massachusetts resident but told the globe reporter, you re going
both as a citizen and in terms of his financial life. in terms of the way i explained that history in massachusetts, did i get any of that wrong as far as you know? i think you got it right. and in trying to present this case to the ballot law commission, we were trying to show exactly what he had said under oath, signing as you point out under the pains and penalties of perjury, not by the way as he characterized it, to the best of his knowledge and belief, but under the pains and penalty of perjury. and we had the tax assessor statements in utah, we had the utah resident tax returns. the massachusetts non-resident tax returns, and then we had his attempt to retroactively rewrite his personal history. he was trying to retroactively essentially refile his taxes so his massachusetts taxes would be filed as if he
was a resident of the state. he was making that retroactively attempt while he was publicly maintaining up until uniof that year that he had filed as a massachusetts resident? that is true. wow, that seems to me to be the heart of the problem. what is happening right now with the demands to see mr. romney s tax returns, both from the democratic opposition but also from the press, is that his answer has been to characterize what s in them, and then say essentially trust me. this is what s in them. there s nothing wrong in them. they show everything to be perfectly legal, trust me on them. as far as you re concerned, and you still have a stake in this matter. you re still a democratic party activist in massachusetts. do you feel like there s an allegory between the trustworthiness and the questions now? think it fits with the pattern of trying to rewrite what his beliefs are, what his positions on issues are, and with trying to retroactively rewrite his personal history.
lifelike corporation, and some other business interests that did not seem to be associated with bain. when there was this more recent controversy about whether or not he should be seen as being involved with bain after he left to go run the olympics, did you see that evidence that he presented a decade ago as being relevant to his case there? he was trying to show that he had family and social ties back to massachusetts. and really nobody was disputing that. the fact is that he had been very clearly stating one thing about his life and he started stating something else. and that he did this, these statements that he then tried to change later in a way oddly enough, it was always in a way that saved him taxes, whether it was property taxes where he declared himself to have a principle residence in utah, and in massachusetts which got him a tax benefit in both places, or income taxes. james roosevelt jr., former