Is this the smoking gun in the Romney/Bain controversy?

Updated July 17, 2001

The New Yorker has uncovered an interview Mitt Romney gave to the Salt Lake Tribune in Feburary 1999, just after he took the job turning around the 2002 Winter Olympics. He discussed his political future.

Here's an excerpt:

I'm not a powder puff…. By that I mean that it's not that I would never consider laying off workers or closing down a plant to save a company. Unfortunately in the business world I know, the world of troubled companies, many businesses can get better with medicine. But many others require painful, wrenching surgery. I have been involved with companies that concluded they had to close a plant in order to survive. And that's an awful, awful thing to have happen. And it's death for a politician to be associated with that.

That makes me wonder if Romney's repeated demands that the Obama campaign apologize for its attacks on the GOP candidate's business background are just for show.

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 What at first seemed like it might be a distraction in a campaign that should be about big issues now may take on a life of its own.

Mitt Romney, it appears, played both sides of the fence when the subject was his role in outsourcing jobs to China and India.

The Boston Globe has uncovered documents that show Romney’s eligibility to run for governor of Massachusetts in 2002 was in question because he was living in Utah at the time, running the Winter Olympics. Romney and his attorney presented evidence to a quasi-judicial panel to show that he still had ties to Massachusetts and still played a role at Bain Capital, his private equity firm, at a time when Bain outsourcing became commonplace.

Yet, once he won ballot access a decade ago, the story changed.

Romney has repeatedly argued in each of his political campaigns that he’s a stellar businessman who knows how to create jobs. At the same time, he has also maintained that he played no role in Bain’s outsourcing of jobs and plant closings in the 1999-2002 period.

The new information reported by the Globe could be a turning point in the campaign, for a few reasons: the subject is a loss of American jobs; the entire episode might represent Romney’s biggest flip-flop; and it seems to show Romney altering the truth in whatever way furthers his political career.

Here’s what the Globe found:

“When I left my employer in Massachusetts in February of 1999 to accept the Olympic assignment,” Romney testified before the state Ballot Law Commission on June 17, 2002, “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.”

Romney also testified that “there were a number of social trips and business trips that brought [him] back to Massachusetts, board meetings” while he was running the Olympics. He added that he remained on the boards of several companies, including the Lifelike Co., in which Bain Capital held a stake until 2001.

Romney’s lawyer at the hearing said that Romney’s work in the private sector continued unbroken while he ran the Olympics.

“He succeeded in that three-year period in restoring confidence in the Olympic Games, closing that disastrous (Olympics) deficit and staging one of the most successful Olympic Games ever to occur on U.S. soil,” said Peter L. Ebb from Ropes & Gray.

“Now while all that was going on, very much in the public eye, what happened to his private and public ties to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts? And the answer is they continued unabated just as they had.”

Ten years later, Romney does not engage in a nuanced answer about how he became a “part-timer” at Bain while working on the Olympics. He denies it all. In television interviews on Friday, he said this: “I had no role whatsoever in the management of Bain Capital after February of 1999.’’

Watch for the Obama campaign, which desperately wants to destroy Romney's reputation, to question whether Romney fraudulently gained ballot access in the 2002 gubernatorial race.

In the meantime, a growing number of financial documents are surfacing that list Romney as a key player at Bain while in his absentee role from 1999-2002. According to the Globe, financial disclosure forms Romney filed in Massachusetts indicate he earned at least $100,000 as a Bain “executive” in 2001 and 2002, separate from investment earnings.

Initially, the idea that undecided voters would latch onto the political fight over the timing of Romney’s departure from Bain seemed unlikely. This was a complicated issue, one of those inside-baseball battles that would have no effect on the November election, according to many pundits.

But it’s now become part of a larger narrative. It fits in with Romney’s elaborate homes and the car elevator for his garage and the Swiss bank account and the Bermuda company and other offshored funds in Luxemburg and other overseas locations.

And it especially plays into the Obama camp’s hands on the one issue that all voters can understand: tax returns. Romney in 2012 has reluctantly released a full tax return covering just one year, yet he gave the 2008 McCain campaign 23 years of tax returns when he wanted to be the vice presidential candidate. 

The Romney camp, which has plenty to work with in defeating President Obama, seems to be caught totally flat-footed in responding to all these financial matters.

For political junkies, the Romney missteps are mystifying. For Republican political strategists, they are worrisome.

But the biggest danger for Romney is that, for undecided voters, this string of events will make them perceive the candidate as the slick businessman who entered politics because the unseemly salesmanship of campaigning was the main attraction.