Hillary Clinton’s campaign has released an ad on the anniversary Mitt Romney producing his tax returns during the 2012 election after being smeared as a tax cheat.
“September 21, 2012,” the text in the Clinton ad reads. “Mitt Romney releases his tax returns, after intense public pressure.”
The ad then repeated the Clinton campaign’s call for GOP nominee Donald Trump to do the same.
“[Trump] promised he’d release them,” the ad continued. “He didn’t. His own family admits it’s a political dodge. Every major nominee since 1976 has released their tax returns. Donald still won’t. It’s time for Donald to tell us what’s wrong.”
Absent from the new Clinton ad is any mention of the fact Romney released his returns after the top-ranking Democratic lawmaker in Congress falsely accused the former Massachusetts governor of being a tax dodge.
Then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., even claimed Romney had paid no taxes for a decade.
“[Romney] has refused to release his tax returns, as we know. If a person coming before this body wanted to be a cabinet officer, he couldn’t be if he did the same refusal Mitt Romney does about tax returns,” Reid said on the floor of the U.S. Senate.
“So the word’s out that he hasn’t paid any taxes for ten years. Let him prove that he has paid taxes, because he hasn’t,” the senator added.
Romney eventually released his tax returns, which showed he not only paid his taxes, but that he also donated a greater percentage of his income to charity than both President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.
Reid all but admitted to the fabrication during an interview last year when he was asked to comment on the inaccuracies of his claims, and he said, “Romney didn’t win, did he?”
Later, in an interview with the Washington Post, Reid again seemed to take pride in his baseless attack on Romney.
“[I]t’s one of the best things I’ve ever done. Why? Because I knew what he had done was not be transparent and forthright about his taxes and to this day he hasn’t released his tax returns,” he said, leveling a very false charge.
“And with that, like everything, I think in life, here’s something I learned from my father, if you’re going to do something, don’t do it half-assed, don’t play around. With the Mitt Romney stuff, I didn’t play around,” he added later.
Reid has never been held accountable for the tax attack.
Clinton’s campaign team released her 2015 tax returns last month. Democratic vice-presidential nominee Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., also released 10 years’ worth of tax returns.
Trump refuses to release his tax information, and he has dodged the issue with a number of excuses, including that he can’t do anything because he’s being audited by the IRS and that there’s “nothing to learn” from his financial filings.
