Romney staff spent nearly $100,000 to hide records

[TroyD]

When is Team Obama going to make sure people know about this?

-----

(Reuters) - Mitt Romney spent nearly $100,000 in state funds to replace computers in his office at the end of his term as governor of Massachusetts in 2007 as part of an unprecedented effort to keep his records secret, Reuters has learned.

The move during the final weeks of Romney's administration was legal but unusual for a departing governor, Massachusetts officials say.

SNIP

When Romney left the governorship of Massachusetts, 11 of his aides bought the hard drives of their state-issued computers to keep for themselves. Also before he left office, the governor's staff had emails and other electronic communications by Romney's administration wiped from state servers, state officials say.

Those actions erased much of the internal documentation of Romney's four-year tenure as governor, which ended in January 2007. Precisely what information was erased is unclear.

Republican and Democratic opponents of Romney say the scrubbing of emails - and a claim by Romney that paper records of his governorship are not subject to public disclosure - hinder efforts to assess his performance as a politician and elected official.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/06/us-usa-campaign-romney-computers-idUSTRE7B500X20111206

[liberal N proud]

1. If that's not criminal, it isat least unethical.

[TroyD]

3. This news has been around for a while

But it seems like Romney has gotten away with it so far.

Romney's files from the Salt Lake City Olympics are also destroyed or still under seal.

I think David Axelrod should tie all of this in together with the tax returns as an example of Romney's deception & lack of transparency.

Btw, when is Team Obama going to go after Romney on the tax returns again?

[Justice]

2. It is very revealing (which is ironic since he is trying to conceal)

[annabanana]

4. Imagine what he'd do to Presidential records . .

Cheney's got nothing on him...

[robinlynne]

5. This is absolutely relevant. Now that Bain Capital is no longer appearing on Romney's record.....

And the governorship is now Romney's chosen past.....

[NCLefty]

6. Just another reason you can't trust him.

Time and again he does something really shady and tries to hide it (see: tax returns we can't see).

[silverweb]

7. K&R

[alcibiades_mystery]

8. So this is Team Obama's fault?

The usual...

[Doctor_J]

9. So you don't think they should make an issue of it?

[alcibiades_mystery]

10. Maybe they should, maybe they shouldn't

It is interesting how a story that should be a negative for Romney gets turned around into a being a negative for Obama, not once, but twice, and through the same method in this thread. I guess this is supposed to be one of the "anti-Romney" stories that inoculates particular posters as they shit all over the Democratic President, though, so tra-la-la.

[TroyD]

12. Not what's going on here at all

The purpose in posting this is topic is one purpose, and one purpose only - to expose Romney's lies and deceptions.

I've already spent several hours today alone doing just that.

Looking for another hidden motive just makes you sound like a birther.

[treestar]

26. Without your first sentence it might be so

The way you posted it made it about another thing the campaign is "doing wrong."

They aren't publicizing Rmoney's record scrub enough. That was the purpose of your first sentence, clearly.

How about writing to the campaign directly? Point out their mistakes. Maybe they'll even give you a job when they realize you know what to do and they don't.

[davidpdx]

28. Really you should lay off

You seem to have a passion to harass this one person. It happened on this thread and another one the other day (and probably several more that I haven't read). If I see it, I'm going to keep flagging it. If you don't like someone, then put them on ignore.

[MADem]

16. They did already. Don't you remember this from a few months ago?

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/06/obama-campaign-says-mitt-romneys-joke-is-no-laughing-matter/

But whether Romney realized it or not, the quip at the end of the note — “erased your hard drives” — provided an awkward reminder of a 2011 Boston Globe investigation revealing that before Romney left office as governor of Massachusetts in late 2006, “11 of his top aides purchased their state-issued computer hard drives, and the Romney administration’s e-mails were all wiped from a server.”
“Romney administration officials had the remaining computers in the governor’s office replaced just before Governor Deval Patrick’s staff showed up to take power in January 2007,” the Globe’s Michael Levenson and Matt Viser reported in a Nov. 2011 article.
(At the time Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul said in a statement that “the governor’s staff complied with the law and longtime executive branch practice. Some employees exercised the option to purchase computer equipment when they left. They did so openly with personal checks.)
But a spokesman for the Obama campaign said on Saurday that Romney’s attempt at campaign trail humor was no laughing matter.
“Mitt Romney may joke about how his staff erased government hard drives to keep his records secret, but what we do know about his record as Governor is anything but funny — he left the state 47th in job creation and number one in per capita debt in the nation,” Obama spokesman Danny Kanner said in a statement.

This is just one issue of many...why replow old fields when there's so much new material to go over?

[kenfrequed]

34. That was a good response

By President Obama's campaign. I wonder if there is a way to bring this up again and get the Romney campaign to comment on the records that were erased? Even a denial would be useful.

[MADem]

35. Nothing wrong with supporters mentioning it--re-tweeting, Facebooking, etc.

I don't think the campaign should directly keep harping on it, though--not with so much better low-hanging fruit. After all, there is a degree of separation between rMoney and his staffers...and what they did, while sleazy, was not illegal at the time. The Commonwealth was behind the curve on "computer stuff" in government. We've since corrected that deficiency.

If there's a contextual opportunity, though, Obama's people should pounce on it. They just shouldn't be the first to re-bring it up. rMoney's dozens of lies at the last debate are still very rich material to mine.

[oldbanjo]

11. Huckabee did almost the same thing

[MADem]

13. This is not news. It's been put out more than once. nt

[TroyD]

15. Yes, that's my point

While it may have been reported earlier in the year, I suspect the majority of voters don't know about it.

It's time to bring it back. I'm glad some people are posting it online & on Twitter again today, which is where I found it.

Romney is starting to talk about his MA record again in a positive way, so it's relevant to ask why he destroyed his files and wants to hide them if he's so proud of his achievements there.

[MADem]

18. Yes, they do. See post sixteen. RMoney's snark provided an opportunity to revisit his deceit.

I'm from MA. I can rattle off shit about that assclown off the top of my head.

He can't "talk about his MA record in a positive way" anywhere where he might be challenged on it.

His record sucked. The legislature ran roughshod over him. When they weren't ignoring him, they wiped their asses on him. He was a total JOKE.

[MADem]

23. His record is under scrutiny every time he brings it up. It's not going unchallenged.

(Edit--I have answered you twice! This info is salient, in any event)

That assertion is just not accurate. Examples:

http://www.denverpost.com/romney/ci_21710799/romneys-record-massachusetts-governor-mixed-bag

But on closer examination, the record as governor he alluded to looks considerably less burnished than Romney suggested.
Bipartisanship was in short supply. Statehouse Democrats complained that he variously ignored, insulted or opposed them, with intermittent charm offensives. He vetoed scores of legislative initiatives and excised budget line items 844 times, according to the nonpartisan research group Fact-check.org. Lawmakers reciprocated by overriding the vast bulk of them.
The big-ticket items that Romney proposed when he entered office in January 2003 went largely unrealized, and some that were achieved turned out to have a comparatively minor impact. A wholesale restructuring of state government was dead on arrival in the legislature; an ambitious overhaul of the state university system was stillborn; a consolidation of transportation fiefs never took place.

http://www.barackobama.com/romney/economics/ma-record/ma-record-slide-01

Mitt Romney ran for governor of Massachusetts promising more jobs, decreased debt, and smaller government.

Here’s what Massachusetts got instead:

Jobs: 47th out of 50 states in job creation
Taxes and fees: Increased by $750 million per year
Long-term debt: Increased more than $2.6 billion
Watch the video to see why Romney economics didn't work then, and won't work now:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/06/us/politics/romney-claims-of-bipartisanship-as-governor-face-challenge.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0

Mr. Romney proved to have a taste for vetoes, killing legislative initiatives in his first two years at more than twice the rate of his more popular Republican predecessor, William F. Weld, The Boston Globe reported in 2004.

Some seemed almost designed to rankle legislators: one rejected an increase in disability payments to a police officer who had slipped on an ice patch. Others reflect his ramrod-straight views on ethics and government waste — knocking down a special pension deal for a state legislator; rejecting a subsidy to Medicaid payments so nursing homes could provide kosher meals to Jewish residents.

“He seemed to take great delight in vetoing bills,” recalled his director of legislative affairs, John O’Keefe. "Some of the bills we would chuckle when we wrote the veto message.”

By 2004, the second year of his term, Mr. Romney was provoked enough to mount an unprecedented campaign to unseat Democratic legislators, spending $3 million in Republican Party money and hiring a nationally known political strategist...The effort failed spectacularly. Republicans lost seats, leaving them with their smallest legislative delegation since 1867. Democratic lawmakers were reported to have been deeply angered by the campaign’s tactics.

There are way bigger fish to fry than his staffers concealing his record by buying up the hard drives. See, the problem with that is that what they did sucked, but it was NOT ILLEGAL. They bought the things legally, and paid for them. Guess who fixed that gaping, sucking hole? Not rMoney ... but it's an unproductive well to keep drilling. Mention it if you'd like, retweet it, talk about it, but there is no need to make that one particular fuckup a cause celebre--because there are bigger and more important failings to highlight--when you focus on smaller, pettier things, you could miss an opportunity to point out the massive turds in his work-record bowl. Like his shitty record AS governor; his inability to work across the aisle; the sneering contempt in which he was held; his low approval ratings; his stupid decisions (his pennywise/pound foolish line item veto that killed a newlywed woman, for example); his record of stunning absenteeism, often in the face of disaster--leaving his vapid and incompetent LT Governor to do nothing but pose for photo ops.

There's plenty of "there" there, and those hard drives are very small potatoes in the big scheme.

[L0oniX]

19. ...and yet his Donny & Marie records are still in plain view.

[Grammy23]

20. I guess one question I have is how common this is for outgoing Governors?

What do they usually do? I saw up thread that Huckabee did it, too. What other Governors took this route? And if so, how can the historical and legal records of the state be maintained if the principle officers are allowed to erase those records at will?

I do think it is a relevant topic especially if there can be links to other questionable things Mitt has done throughout his career both as a politician and while he was at Bain. It all speaks to his character.....or more to the point, his LACK of it. Secrecy seems to be a big thing in his approach to how he conducts business.

[MADem]

36. There was no law against it when rMoney's staff did it. There is now, though! nt

[NBachers]

21. "You people don't deserve to know what you paid for during my sovereignty "

[roody]

22. Excuse my ignorance; did he run for

a second term?

[MADem]

24. HELL to the NO! He was told "Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out."

He was hardly ever there, anyway--he spent millions to get that job in order to use it as "Executive Experience" on his "I wanna be President and do what my daddy couldn't do" resume. He had little interest in actually doing ANYTHING for the people of the Commonwealth. We were serfs in the backdrop to his craven ambition.

[FailureToCommunicate]

29. "We were serfs in the backdrop to his craven ambition."

Worth repeating!
And we got doubly screwed that he used OUR tax dollars to wipe his trail as 'Governor'

A terrible day not long ago:

?1342185888

[MADem]

31. Here's hoping the great Commonwealth turns away from its sexist nature when it comes to choosing

Senators this time round!

[treestar]

25. Is it all that thrilling?

Maybe others have done it. Maybe Rmoeny's other sins seem far greater. It's akin to right wing claims that Obama spent an alleged fortune trying not to produce his birth certificate.

[cleduc]

27. Some time ago, I sent an email to the Boston Globe

reporters who covered the erasure story asking them to inquire about backup tapes. I asked if Romney's government backup their systems to tape or other media and if they couldn't request getting info from the backups?

Never heard back or saw anything since.

[MADem]

32. Send 'em another one. Engage them in conversation. Give them a direction.

They might pursue--or perhaps they already have and came up goose eggs. I thought I read that they looked for backups and there were none, but I might be mis-remembering.

[Tippy]

30. Don't suprise me.....

I don't know what he believes, or belives in...but being truthful is not one of them..

[argueta]

33. VIDEO: Mitt Romney in debate cheated who beat Barack Obama?

VIDEO: Mitt Romney in debate cheated who beat Barack Obama?

[Major Hogwash]

37. This is totally illegal. The public's right to know outweighs the former Governor's privacy.

" . . . and a claim by Romney that paper records of his governorship are not subject to public disclosure . . . "

BULLSHIT!!

[blkmusclmachine]

38. If you got nothin' to hide...

OPERATION NORTHWOODS

[amuse bouche]

39. This is not a secret

but needs more exposure