Restore Our Future, the Mitt Romney SuperPAC that allegedly has done some illegal, back channel coordinating with his campaign, will run $7.2-million worth of TV ads during the London Olympics touting how the candidate "saved" the Olympics in Salt Lake City in 2002.
The ads will air in 11 key swing states, starting July 31: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.
If you see the spots, notice how the ads lie about how he "rescued" the Olympics from being a sporting and financial nightmare. For example, they'll never mention how Romney used several million dollars of the organizing committee's money to hire a bevy of expensive Washington lobbyists to obtain a federal bailout of the 2001 event.
"Without federal money, Salt Lake would have been a disaster," says one person in Utah who was intimately familiar at the time with the game's problems. "Romney always seems to overlook this when he talks about how he 'rescued' them."
Indeed, a written statement from Charlie Spiers, treasurer of Restore Our Future, goes out of its way to avoid discussing the federal bailout. Spiers says, “Ten years ago, Mitt Romney rescued the Salt Lake City Olympics from scandal and financial ruin, transforming a crushing deficit into a surplus …"
D'oh! He never even hints at the role Washington played in providing the same sort of financial lifeline Romney chastised the government for giving to the auto industry.
In other words, the SuperPAC is being as selective in its use of facts as a Romney stump speech. It may be a lie of omission rather than commission, but it's still a lie.