Some poor reporting @ Politico:

politico.com

Mitt Romney said Thursday that he has paid at least 13 percent of his income in taxes every year.

What Romney actually said:

buzzfeed.com

“I did go back and look at my taxes and over the past 10 years I never paid less than 13 percent. I think the most recent year is 13.6 or something like that. So I paid taxes every single year. Harry Reid’s charge is totally false. I’m sure waiting for Harry to put up who it was that told him what he says they told him. I don’t believe it for a minute, by the way. But every year I’ve paid at least 13 percent and if you add in addition the amount that goes to charity, why the number gets well above 20 percent.”

A couple of things worth noting. First, the reason he gets asked this question about having always paid over a certain amount is that he made this promise to ABC’s David Muir last month:

abcnews.go.com

Muir: Can we clear this up by asking a simple yes or no question? Was there ever any year when you paid lower than 13.9%?

Romney: I haven’t calculated that. I’m happy to go back and look but my view is I’ve paid all the taxes required by law.

In his statement today Romney doesn’t actually address that question, as he conspicuously sets a cutoff of 10 years back. Perhaps this is because 10 years is a pretty typical Presidential tax return disclosure, so perhaps he’s hoping to blur the issue enough that folks mistakenly give him credit for having released 10 years vs just 1. Or maybe it’s because Harry Reid’s “source’s” claim involved a 10 year period and by using a 10 year window himself he hopes the media will treat that as a rebuttal (though obviously if Reid’s source is real, he’s supposed to be some Bain insider who worked with Romney, so any 10 year period they could have knowledge of would be more than 10 years ago).

Also, even though politico’s write-up includes the word ‘income’, Romney never actually said that himself.