Harry Reid Gives Shameful Response to His Attack on Mitt Romney’s Taxes
During the 2012 presidential campaign, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid made an outrageous allegation that GOP nominee Mitt Romney hadn’t paid taxes for 10 years.
Reid, who
recently announced that he will not seek re-election in 2016, first made the claim in an interview with the
Huffington Post on July 31, 2012. “He didn’t pay taxes for 10 years,” he said. “Now do I know that that’s true? Well, I’m not certain, but obviously he can’t release those tax returns. How would it look?”
This was not a slip of the tongue, it was a calculated lie that Reid repeated several times in an attempt to pressure Romney into releasing tax returns for years prior to 2010.
A few days later, on Aug. 2, Reid doubled down in a speech on the Senate floor. “If a person coming before this body wanted to be a Cabinet officer, he couldn’t be if he had the same refusal Mitt Romney does about tax returns,” he said. “So the word is out that he has not paid any taxes for 10 years. Let him prove he has paid taxes, because he has not.”
He tripled down on the accusation later that day in a
statement saying that he was told by an “extremely credible source” that Romney hadn’t paid taxes for 10 years.
The bogus claim created a media firestorm at the time, and earned Reid a “
pants on fire“ rating from PolitiFact and “
four Pinocchios“ from Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler, who wrote that Reid “has no basis to make his incendiary claim” and should “hold himself to a high standard of accuracy when making claims about political opponents.”