Thurston 'Mitt' Howell, III
At this point I think Mitt Romney is just
trying to make himself like an out-of-touch multimillionaire elitist who has no concept of how the little people live. Because you couldn't make this stuff up.
It turns out the financial statements Romney filed in August had some notable omissions on it, omissions which were only caught by reporters now that Romney has been forced begrudgingly to release some of his tax returns. Now notable? Via the Los Angeles Times:
Among the assets omitted is a Swiss bank account in Ann Romney's blind trust that campaign officials said held $3 million of the couple's money until it was closed in 2010.
All right, so we're dealing with "errors" in Romney's previously filed ethics paperwork to the tune of three million dollars just in one omitted asset. What's the worst way you can think of to handle that, if you're Mitt Romney? Oh, let's say:
The Romney campaign described the discrepancies as “trivial” but acknowledged Thursday afternoon that they are undergoing an internal review of how the investments were reported and will make “some minor technical amendments” to Romney’s financial disclosure that will not alter the overall picture of his finances.
Trivial? A three million dollar error is trivial, now? Good God, if I accidentally discovered that my bank account had three million more dollars than I thought it did, that wouldn't be trivial, that would would be an occurrence of the caliber of discovering sentient Pop Tarts. And I can't even imagine how interested my bank and the government would be in how the hell I managed to stumble across an extra three million dollars. This isn't forgetting-it-in-your-other-pants money we're talking about.
But this is the same guy who said that the $480,000+ he made in speaker fees during one year was "not very much" money, so we already knew his idea of money was very, very distant from what most other Americans might think. The even more telling part is that he's probably telling the truth: Romney is worth at minimum $150 million, according to his own admissions (any bets on how accurate he's being there?), so accidentally forgetting to declare $3 million at a time is, indeed, probably considered "trivial" to him.