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What’s Mitt Romney Hiding?

By CREW Staff

CREW has led the fight to ensure preservation of public records, without which we cannot hold public officials accountable for their actions.  When millions of emails went missing from the Bush White House, we sued to force their recovery and the implementation of effective record keeping systems.  Currently we’re fighting the Securities and Exchange Commission in court over the agency’s sanctioned policy of destroying closed investigative files.   

So, when a politician goes out of his or her way to destroy records and hide things from the public, our antenna goes up. 

Take this eye opening story from The Washington Post this morning, which details the extraordinary (and expensive) measures Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney employed to keep the potentially messy details of his time as Massachusetts governor out of the public eye.

The high points from the Post:

• Mitt Romney spent nearly $100,000 in state funds to replace computers in his office at the end of his term as governor of Massachusetts in 2007 as part of an unprecedented effort to keep his records secret.
• When Romney left the governorship of Massachusetts, 11 of his aides bought the hard drives of their state-issued computers for themselves. Also before he left office, the governor’s staff had e-mails and other electronic communications wiped from state servers, state officials say.
• Theresa Dolan, former director of administration for the governor’s office, told Reuters that Romney’s efforts to control or wipe out the records were unprecedented.  Dolan said that in her 23 years as an aide to successive governors “no one had ever inquired about, or expressed the desire” to purchase their computer hard drives before Romney’s tenure.
• The cleanup of records by Romney’s staff included spending $205,000 for a three-year lease on new computers for the governor’s office, according to official documents and state officials.  In signing the lease, Romney aides broke an earlier three-year lease that provided the same number of computers for about half the cost — $108,000, according to documents.

All of these actions were taken just as Mr. Romney was preparing to ramp up his 2008 presidential campaign, so it’s pretty unlikely the timing was coincidental.   As the 2012 campaign season gets in full swing, the public will have plenty of questions for Mr. Romney.  For example, while he has made a point to attack President Obama on health care, it certainly would be interesting to know what he and his staff said about the issue during his time as governor. With Mr. Romney’s wholesale destruction of his records, however, we may never get the chance.

This seems to be just another attempt by Mr. Romney to avoid questions about his past.  Lately, he’s been doing everything possible to avoid reporters and complained that even Fox News is too tough an interview for him.  It all begs the question: what’s Mitt Romney trying to hide?