As I've always said, As my 20 years of tax returns clearly show, I paid 13.9% of the taxes I was supposed to pay - and not a dollar more.
Romney's Stolen Taxes
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I'm waiting on news about those two thumb drives taken from the Republican and Democratic parties in Williamson County Tennessee. It's odd that nothing fresh has been noted as I felt that an obvious hoax would have been quickly called out.
I have some concerns brought about by my own personal experience in Dan Rather's fall from grace because of documents of questionable repute. Did Karl Rove, or a similar dark arts ninja, load just a couple years of faked Romney taxes onto thumb drives and then drop the sticks off at the GOP and Democratic headquarters?
I thinks its safe to say the Republicans would not have divulged the files but its a tossup whether a local Democratic official might not run to the local TV station waving copies of "Romney's tax returns!"
It wouldn't be long before the documents would be discredited. We'd have to turn down the volumes on our neighbor's television when the incessant cries of "foul" hit the air. Just like that, the whole issue of Romney's taxes gets discredited as a story. No serious journalist would ever dare bring up Romney's tax returns - or lack of a release- again.
This is close to what happened to Rather in 2004 when he aired questionable documents about Bush's National Guard service.
These documents came to Rather through Bill Burkett - a stooge caught up in his own good intentions and zeal. Burkett's source was later tied to Karl Rove (See Texas Monthly for more details, though there is more to the story than they report)
Burkett then hustled the questionable documents straight to Dan Rather. Rather rushed to air his story without puting the documents to extensive vetting. The documents began to be questioned within hours of his story airing and within a few days most people believed the Burkett documents to be thoroughly discredited.
It wasn't pretty. Rather soon capitulated and quickly faded into silence.
This was all devastating to me. I'd spent an incredible amount of effort and time researching and writing about G W Bush's National Guard story only to watch Dan Rather come in and muddy the water with questionable documents.
At this time I had been interviewed twice by Rather's producer, Mary Mapes, about the Bush National Guard Story. I had offered them the original Bush military records which I had obtained through FOIA request with an unbroken chain of custody paper trail, complete with letters of release. Mapes was more interested in what I knew about Bill Burkett whom I knew from paranoid emails he sent me about finding documents at an old Air Force base in Texas. I didn't trust Burkett and I warned Rather's producer that Bill Burkett had ties to J.H. Hatfield - the Author of "Fortunate Son."
Fortunate Son came out during the runnup to the 2000 election.The book made claims about a G W Bush cocaine arrest which was supposedly covered up by his father G H W Bush. The book was quickly discredited when the author was found to have been a felon.
With his book pulled from shelves, the law coming after him again and mounting debts, J H Hatfield then killed himself - but not before declaring that Karl Rove had given him the cocaine arrest story. There are phone records of at least one call between Rove and Hatfield.
Maybe we'll get lucky. Maybe someone really did get in and hack Romney's taxes.
But maybe Karl Rove went back to his old alchemy and found a way to make the story of Romney's refusal to release taxes into something radioactively frightening to the media.
I hope we learn soon. The suspense is killing me.