Callum Borchers and Christopher Rowland have a big story in the Globe today: “Mitt Romney stayed at Bain 3 years longer than he stated: Firm’s 2002 filings identify him as CEO, though he said he left in 1999.”
This is exactly the kind of story that will cut into Romney’s appeal to independents because it hits a key factor for electability: honesty.
“You can’t say statements filed with the SEC are meaningless. This is a fact in an SEC filing,” said Roberta S. Karmel, now a professor at Brooklyn Law School.
“It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to say he was technically in charge on paper but he had nothing to do with Bain’s operations,” Karmel continued. “Was he getting paid? He’s the sole stockholder. Are you telling me he owned the company but had no say in its investments?”
The Globe found nine SEC filings submitted by four different business entities after February 1999 that describe Romney as Bain Capital’s boss; some show him with managerial control over five Bain Capital entities that were formed in January 2002, according to records in Delaware, where they were incorporated.
A Romney campaign official, who requested anonymity to discuss the SEC filings, acknowledged that they “do not square with common sense.”
Obama is a known quantity. Romney is trying to build a persona. Glaring contradictions like this do not help. It’s as if Scott Brown claimed to be an independent Republican and then voted for a measure pushed by the fundamentalist wing of the GOP to allow employers to terminate their employee’s reproductive health plans because they disagreed with their personal choices. Oh, wait.
Discuss
44 Comments . Leave a comment below.This is a big deal. It’s not a matter of him just being on paper.
Why didn’t his campaign anticipate this ahead of time?
This is a “there you go again” moment.
David Corn at Mother Jones has been on this for some time. The other day, Josh Marshall at TPM added some new info. Interestingly, the self-styled “fact-checkers” have been resolute in insisting that Romney left Bain in February 1999, despite the mounting evidence to the contrary; one suspects that now that the Globe has added its imprimatur to the story, they will change their tune. That’s a pretty sad commentary on the fact checkers.
This seems to be yet another example of an important story being broken on the internet by alt media, but not taken seriously as part of the national conversation until a mainstream media operation jumps on the bandwagon. An interesting phenomenon that we can expect to see repeated more and more frequently.
The Globe has now acknowledged that it should have credited Mother Jones and TPM, and apparently will do so. It was an unfortunate omission that casts a shadow over what should have been a great day for the Globe. It’s still pretty good, though.
Let’s just hope that it actually will be taken seriously now.
To your point about alt media, it makes some sense that the general public is often resistant to fully accept stories that are published by sources that they do not already know and trust. There are so many faulty sources of information out there, and so many alt media sites that cannot be trusted. Personally I’m glad that a lot of the right-wing BS out there doesn’t get taken too seriously. Like it or not, the mainstream media still plays an important role in “vetting” story-lines first identified by lower-tier media sources.
likely to take stuff directly from the right-wing alternative press/blogsophere than the left-wing.
Ironically, the Globe is acting more like bloggers: taking an established story and amplifying it. If they are smart–and I have serious doubts about the Globe management–they will use alternative media for story sources more often.
Being the news source of record and doing the vetting can be part of their role in the new news economy.
I see that we each posted similar comments pretty much simultaneously.
Will the GOP nominee be Newt Gingrich after all?
It was founded in 1978 and still produces a paper version.
In any event, your comment provides its own explanation: this story didn’t make it onto BMG until today. There is a hierarchy of credibility in the media. The Globe has been building its brand since 1872. That’s worth a lot.
The direction, however, is unmistakable. First, newspapers. Then, radio. Then, TV. Now, the Internet. What is interesting to me is how difficult it appears to be to jump media. Almost no big print companies created leading radio or TV brands, and almost none of the existing media conglomerates have been able to develop leading websites. Look at the wipe out that is The Daily. Heh.
and a paper edition doesn’t disqualify one from being “alt media,” IMHO. That term has been around long before reporting took to the internet. Rolling Stone, The Phoenix, Mother Jones, even the Nation – they’re all “alt,” if you ask me.
I did put the story out on Twitter when Mother Jones first reported it, but never did have time to write it up properly.
and still has some rules in place. I’m certain there are other reasons currently, but that was the primary one for many years.
Did Bain do something especially egregious or embarrasing between 1999 and 2002 that he was hoping we would not associate him with?
A number of the big job losses and bankruptcies associated with Bain happen to have come in that time period.
Another possible answer: the same reason he tied his dog to the roof of his car. It seemed like a sensible solution to a vexing problem at the time.
Here’s what FactCheck had to say (on July 2) about the seriousness of this (emphasis mine):
I call your attention to a followup from TalkingPointsMemo, where Josh Marshall shows two additional SEC filings from July 2000 and February 2001 where Bain Capital describes Mitt Romney’s name and title as “Chief Executive Officer, President, and Managing Director”, and his principal occupation as “Managing Director of Bain Capital, Inc.”
It seems clear enough that Mitt Romney lied about his status at Bain Capital. Is the GOP prepared to nominate a felon for President?
And he hasn’t even been charged with a crime in a court of law.
that statutes of limitations on Romney’s false statements, if false statements they are, have probably expired, since we’re talking 10 years ago.
Still, one wonders whether Massachusetts regulators might want to inquire about some of his disclosures based on what’s emerged in SEC filings.
if we’re excusing the nomination (never mind election) of a candidate because that felony they allegedly committed can’t be a felony now because the candidate just skirted the statutes of limitations.
At the very least, if he can’t be tried in court, the media should be amply describing the evidence to the American people so they can weigh the evidence on election day.
I’m pretty sure that a person who commits a felony is a “felon”, even if he or she gets away with it.
Surely if the Tea Party, Donald Trump, and their ilk can claim that Barack Obama is ineligible to hold office, the more extremist elements of the left can describe Mitt Romney as a “felon”.
Does BMG need to qualify this as “alleged felon” or something in order to avoid legal harassment? Just wondering.
In all this talk about the semantics involved here, let’s not lose track of the fact the he has repeatedly lied about the length of his employment at Bain. Lying seems to be just about the only thing he does with conviction.
n/t
Now that’s entertainment.
it surfaces just as Governor Romney (or possibly Citizen Fehrnstrom) decides to call the POTUS of us all a liar in so many words:
Happy days.
It’s great to see that Politico – the most read Political news site by Washington staffers and lobbyists – has this at their top story.
He wants to see our papers, but he won’t show us his – something like that.
of Bain, Romney now claims he was not involved in any investment decisions. He was on the SEC filings because he was still technically the owner but hadn’t transferred ownership to other partners.
If elected POTUS, what other partners can we expect him to transfer ownership to?
…that he’ll transfer ownership of the USA to Bain Capital, or just put the country in a “blind trust” so he doesn’t have to do that pesky routine governing:)
You get it!
Were you lying then or are you lying now?
The claim that Romney was listed as CEO because it took the partnership that took over three years to replace him means that, for three years, Bain Capital did not report to the SEC who was actually running Bain Capital.
As the SEC filings found and published by TPM show, Bain Capital reported that Mitt Romney was its senior executive.
So either Bain Capital lied to the SEC (and its investors) about its executive team (which is itself serious), or Mitt Romney lied when he filed papers declaring that he was NOT running Bain, or both.
Romney’s people are saying that he officially held the position for several years after he stopped performing the duties of his job and that he was actually off doing something else during that time.
Are they getting Bain confused with his tenure as Massachusetts governor??
Bain Capital accepted money from investors and made filings to the SEC that proclaimed Mitt Romney as its CEO (and managing director). If Mitt Romney wasn’t acting in that capacity, then I would think those filings were a material misrepresentation.
I don’t know of any reason why the responsibilities aren’t delegable. It is quite unusual though.
There are plausible (but unlikely) explanations that cannot be ruled out based on the Globe article, because Bain is a complex organization of funds, assets, and management, and the Globe neither describes what they are taling about with specificity, nor links a pdf of the SEC filings.
It is possible that the management entity–which makes no profit and exists only to process paychecks– changed in 1999, so that the thing that Romney was the CEO of was no longer the manager at that point. The article is frustratingly non-informative about crucial technical details.
In any event, the manner in which these unlikely-but-plausible explanations would be demonstrated involve the release of tax returns, personal and corporate.
Astonishing that Team Romney wasn’t on this long ago. Hasn’t he been running for President since 2004?
There are two: July 2000 and February 2001.
Each is identified (in the above links) as a “SCHEDULE 13D (Rule 13-d-101)”.
They include paragraphs such as the following (emphasis mine):
I’m no lawyer, but these documents ARE written English (even if legalese). As a lay person (and certainly as a voter), to me they say pretty explicitly that Mitt Romney headed both US parties (Bain Capital Investors VI, Inc. and Bain Capital Inc.) to this transaction.
And the “partners” entities are the things that own assets, and the “Inc.” entity is the thing that manage the assets. The plausible but not likely explanation I saw yesterday is that Inc. ceased to be the manager in 1999, and that a new management entity was put in place, which would have left Romney as CEO of a company that had no role, and a passive shareholder in assets managed by the new entity.
I am relatively sure that if this is indeed his explanation, he will have to come up with tax returns. In any event, he’s knocked far off message for awhile in July, on account of a dreadful oversight by his campaign.
That was really the attempted humor in my comment above, but I guess I wasn’t very effective. The point being that just as he left Bain while supposedly still in charge, he did the same thing as governor.
And laughed. Would have given you a six if we could do such things.
Where is the defense?
You see the value of our differently winged contributors. This one stings, so they are quiet. My point is they add entertainment, and energy, and important insights into mindset, however enervating.
but sometimes, when they redirect the entire discussion with made-up nonsense and far-flung hypotheticals…
Well, I just don’t know.
Looking over these documents (which I did) is not exactly enlightening.
Two points I would make.
Nobody is picking up this story as that big of a deal. I measure this by the way it comes up in my Google News.
Romney got paid $100K for this, which in the corporate world is nothing. Directors at small/medium companies get paid $100K for showing up at eight 2 hour meetings, so I can’t believe Romney actually did anything for these entities.
with “other things to do.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/do-bain-sec-documents-suggest-mitt-romney-is-a-criminal/2012/07/12/gJQAlyPpgW_blog.html
Thank God WaPo has determined, in their opinion, that he is not, considering they missed this aspect in their original June story.
How about run-of-the-mill liar? Yeah, that works.
He won’t see felony charges, and he won’t see the Oval Office either.
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