re: #397 Killgore Trout

Yes they have: Do Bain SEC documents suggest Mitt Romney is a criminal?

TPM is also hyping the story this morning but neither TPM of Huffpo, unlike the WaPo fact checker, link to the documents for reference. What Huffpo and TPM don’t tell us is the results of the investigation.

The State Ballot Commission actually made no such determination though. You can read for yourself that they’ve conflated the accurate “The State Ballot Commission made no such determination though” in the previous paragraph into the utterly unsupported “conclusion” you bolded. Factcheck’s “conclusion” doesn’t flow from the evidence and it’s unbelievably lazy and unprofessional for them to pretend it does. Another thing they didn’t address the discrepancy between Romney’s 2011 FEC declaration that he hadn’t been involved with any Bain affiliated entity since 1999, when his testimony says he was attending board meeting for Lifelike Co.

It’s also difficult to believe that you’ve even read the testimony:

Speaking before the ballot commission on June 18, 2002, Romney offered a different story: that he had every intention of returning to Bain Capital at the time he left to take over the Olympics, and only later decided he wanted to move on from the company entirely.

“When I left my employer in Massachusetts in February of 1999 to accept the Olympic assignment, I left on the basis of a leave of absence, indicating that I, by virtue of that title, would return at the end of the Olympics to my employment at Bain Capital, but subsequently decided not to do so and entered into a departure agreement with my former partners, I use that in the colloquial sense, not legal sense, but my former partners,” Romney said.

He continued: “Upon completion of that agreement and that understanding with them, it was at approximately at that time that Ann and I decided that we would devote the time that I would spend in my career going forward to public service of one kind or another.”

So his state of mind on leaving was that it was a temporary absence and that he would return.