Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said Thursday that new revelations about Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital mean he’d have trouble gaining Senate approval for pretty much any job.
“He not only couldn’t be confirmed as a cabinet secretary, he couldn’t be confirmed as dog catcher,” Reid told reporters at a Capitol press briefing, in response to a question from TPM. “Because a dog catcher, you’re at least going to want to look at his income tax returns.”
“The long report that we have in the Boston Globe today indicates that, as one of his own employees said, it doesn’t make sense,” Reid continued. “He said he left Bain to go to the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and stopped any association with Bain. But his SEC filings indicated that he was Chief Executive Officer, sole stockholder, and ran the corporation for at least 3 more years. And that’s why people who say there’s been advertisements where businesses were closed, people laid off - and he says oh I wasn’t there, I left in 1999. As his own operative said, it doesn’t make sense. And it doesn’t.”
Reid said the issue is important because Bain was accused of being involved with outsourcing jobs in those ensuing years, and Romney’s campaign has argued that he had left by then.
The Romney campaign pushed back on the Globe story Thursday morning.
“The article is not accurate,” said Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul. “As Bain Capital has said, as Governor Romney has said, and as has been confirmed by independent fact checkers multiple times, Governor Romney left Bain Capital in February of 1999 to run the Olympics and had no input on investments or management of companies after that point.”
But don’t expect Democrats to let up on the attacks.
“The latest [report] shows that even when he said he didn’t have an affiliation with Bain, he did,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told TPM. “And so this is one big morass for Mitt Romney, and it’s going to stay with him until he comes clean and reveals everything.”
Sahil Kapur
Sahil Kapur is a congressional reporter for TPM. He previously covered politics and public policy for numerous publications including The Guardian and The Huffington Post. He can be reached at sahil [at] talkingpointsmemo.com.
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