Mitt Romney Never Thought He’d Have To Release Tax Returns: Bain Sources
WASHINGTON — Mitt Romney has been determined to resist releasing his tax returns at least since his bid for Massachusetts governor in 2002 and has been confident that he will never be forced to do so, several current and former Bain executives tell The Huffington Post. Had he thought otherwise, say the sources based on their longtime understanding of Romney, he never would have gone forward with his run for president.
Bain executives say they’ve been instructed to keep company and Romney-specific information completely confidential, tightening the lockdown on an already closed company.
But pressure has been building on the presumptive GOP nominee. On Tuesday, the conservative National Review added its voice to a chorus of Republicans pushing him to disclose his returns from the years before 2010.
The Obama campaign has been hammering Romney for the past few weeks over his time at Bain, which Romney claims ended in February 1999, but which documents and his own testimony show lasted much longer. The ultimate prize for the Obama campaign would be a trove of Romney’s tax returns.
So far, the intense focus on his Bain time seems to have only hardened Romney’s objection to releasing more returns. He is “not enthusiastic,” he told the National Review on Tuesday, about giving Democrats thousands of more pages to rifle through for material that they can “distort and lie about.”
