The latest Bain-related smear takes hit after hit

Earlier today, I wrote about the Boston Globe’s attempt to breathe life into Team Obama’s Bain-related smear of Mitt Romney. Here some additional developments.

First, Bain Capital has issued this statement confirming that Romney left the company in February 1999.

Mitt Romney left Bain Capital in February 1999 to run the Olympics and has had absolutely no involvement with the management or investment activities of the firm or with any of its portfolio companies since the day of his departure. Due to the sudden nature of Mr. Romney’s departure, he remained the sole stockholder for a time while formal ownership was being documented and transferred to the group of partners who took over management of the firm in 1999. Accordingly, Mr. Romney was reported in various capacities on SEC filings during this period.

Second, FactCheck.org, which has rejected Team Obama’s claims that Romney was involved in making decisions at Bain after February 1999, is not persuaded otherwise by the Boston Globe’s story.

We see little new in the Globe piece. So far, nobody has shown that Romney was actually managing Bain — even part-time — during his time at the Olympics, or that he was anything but a passive, absentee owner during that time, as both Romney and Bain have long said.

Third, confirming that there is indeed little new in its piece, the Boston Globe has admitted that it failed to credit to the work of other outlets whose work the Globe used without adknowledgement.

Pieces of this story were reported by other news organizations. . .[O]ur policy is to give credit to other news organizations for their work. In the editing and shortening process, I have learned, passages giving credit were removed.

Why were they removed? Probably to make the Globe’s recycled story seem fresh. It isn’t.

Fourth, Fortune Magazine has documents that support the fact that Romney stopped his involvement with Bain when he and Bain say he did. For example:

Bain Capital began circulating offering documents for its seventh private equity fund in June 2000. Those documents include several pages specifying fund management. The section begins:

Set forth below is information regarding the background of the senior private equity investment professionals of Bain Capital. Also listed are certain investment professionals responsible for the day-to-day affairs of the Brookside and Sankaty funds, which are affiliated funds of Fund VII.

It then goes on to list 18 managers of the private equity fund. Mitt Romney is not among them. Same goes for an affiliated co-investment fund, whose private placement memorandum is dated September 2000.

Similarly:

[Bain’s] first dedicated venture capital effort — whose private placement memorandum is dated January 2001. Romney also isn’t listed among its “key investment professionals,” or as part of its day-to-day operations or investment committee.

In sum, as Fortune concludes, the contemporaneous Bain documents show that Romney was indeed telling the truth about no longer having operational input at Bain, which, of course, is different from no longer having legal or financial ties to the firm.

The Boston Globe plainly has swung and missed. But count on this: the Globe and Obama’s other supporters in the MSM will keep swinging.

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses