President Obama’s campaign has imitated the dishonesty of his super PAC, to judge from a fact check of a “badly misleading” television ad that comes very close to accusing Mitt Romney of committing tax fraud.
“There’s so much deceit here we hardly know where to start,” explains Brooks Jackson at FactCheck.org, which is run by Annenberg Public Policy Center. He’s commenting on a new ad that strongly suggests Romney committed tax fraud. “It wasn’t Romney who was avoiding taxes, it was Marriott Corp. And there’s no evidence to support the ad’s speculation that Romney himself paid no income tax, or that he did something illegal,” Jackson had already noted.
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Jackson also noted that the central claims of the ad are attributed to CNN, with only the fine print acknowledging that it was an opinion piece.
“It’s not surprising that this ad joins a host of other claims cited as false and misleading by a desperate Obama campaign whose record on the economy has failed millions of middle class families in America,” said Romney campaign spokesman Lenny Alcivar.
Today’s report comes as the Obama super PAC is under fire for a video that blames Romney for a woman’s death by cancer. “Our Briana Keilar did a fact check of that ad and it’s full of falsehoods,” said CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, who noted that the Romney campaign and super PAC have both fallen afoul of the fact checkers. In this case, Blitzer was unable to elicit a condemnation of the super PAC ad from Obama campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki.
The Fact Checker at The Washington Post assigned “four Pinocchios” to an Obama ad in June that attacked Romney as a “corporate raider.”
