Ex-White House hopeful Mike Huckabee tore into former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney on Thursday for insinuating that his successor, presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, is hiding a “bombshell of unusual size” in his unreleased tax returns.
“I supported Romney, just as I will Trump, despite having serious differences with both,” Huckabee wrote on his website. “But I am especially disappointed in Mitt for this latest attack.”
“He’s not only trying to sink his own party’s presumptive nominee, but he’s factually incorrect and he’s making the same unfair attack on Trump that was launched against him in 2012,” added the former Arkansas governor.
In a Facebook post Wednesday afternoon, Romney, who’s repeatedly said he will not support Trump, described the billionaire’s refusal to release his tax returns until they’re done being audited by the IRS as “disqualifying.”
“There is only one logical explanation for Mr. Trump’s refusal to release his returns,” Romney wrote. “There is a bombshell in them. Given Mr. Trump’s equanimity with other flaws in his history, we can only assume it’s a bombshell of unusual size.”
But Huckabee, who defeated Romney in the Iowa caucus in 2008, accused the former Massachusetts governor of leveling baseless charges against Trump and suggested his time would be better spent criticizing the actual tax code.
“If Mitt Romney wants to talk about taxes while showing the world what a real Republican stands for, he should stop trying to destroy the party’s presumptive nominee and instead aim his fire at a more appropriate target: the 70,000-plus-page tax code,” he wrote.
Huckabee also compared Romney to one of his biggest critics in 2012, then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, writing: “Mitt also came under fire for not releasing his tax returns swiftly enough. Harry Reid took advantage of that to deliberately lie from the Senate floor that Romney might be trying to hide his own bombshell: that he hadn’t paid any taxes in 10 years.
“Reid knew that accusation was a blatant falsehood, but when asked about it two years later, he expressed no regrets for his slander. Instead, Reid smirked, ‘He didn’t win, did he?'”
“The only revelation to come from that story was that Harry Reid was an unrepentant liar, hardly a ‘bombshell’ to anyone who’d been paying attention for the past 20 or so years,” Huckabee wrote.
Trump has repeatedly said that he plans to release his tax returns once the IRS has completed their audit, though the federal agency has said that nothing prevents him from making the documents public while they are under examination.
The de facto GOP nominee has not specified what he plans to do if the audit is not completed before the November election.
