He wouldn’t know a fact if it bit him on the arse:
The Palm Beach meeting, which has not been previously reported, demonstrates the duality of Romney’s role as he parted ways with Bain, an issue that has sparked controversy in his presidential campaign. Romney has said in financial disclosure statements that he “was not involved in the operations of any Bain Capital entity in any way” after Feb. 11, 1999. But he was still legally the CEO, with numerous duties and obligations that were his alone, until early 2002.
Interviews with a half-dozen of Romney’s former partners and associates, as well as public records, show that he was not merely an absentee owner during this period. He signed dozens of company documents, including filings with regulators on a vast array of Bain’s investment entities. And he drove the complex negotiations over his own large severance package, a deal that was critical to the firm’s future without him, according to his former associates.
Indeed, by remaining CEO and sole shareholder, Romney held on to his leverage in the talks that resulted in his generous 10-year retirement package, according to former associates.
“The elephant in the room was not whether Mitt was involved in investment decisions but Mitt’s retention of control of the firm and therefore his ability to extract a huge economic benefit by delaying his giving up of that control,” said one former associate, who, like some other Romney associates, spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak for the company.
***James Cox, a professor of corporate and securities law at Duke University, said Bain’s continued reference to Romney as CEO and sole shareholder indicated that Romney was still the final authority. Moreover, Cox said, Romney would likely have been updated regularly about Bain Capital’s profits while he was negotiating his severance package. As a result, Cox said, Romney’s statement that he had no involvement with “any Bain Capital entity” appears “inconsistent” with his actions.
“If he is 100 percent owner, I just find it incredible that what I would call ‘big decisions’ — acquisitions, restructuring, changes in business policy — that they would not have passed on to him on an informational basis, not asking for formal approval but just keeping him in the loop,” Cox said.
***While Romney continued negotiating the terms of the severance deal, he referred to himself as CEO. In July 1999, five months after he had left for Utah, he provided a quote for a press release issued by Rehnert and Wolpow, who had left Bain to start their own firm, Audax. He was referred to as “Bain Capital CEO W. Mitt Romney, currently on a part-time leave of absence.”
In that release, Romney said of the departing partners, “While we will miss them, we wish them well and look forward to working with them as they build their firm.”
Those did not sound like the words of someone who had severed his ties to Bain Capital. To the contrary, it implied that Romney was still a part of Bain and its future. Two and a half years after leaving to run the Olympics, Romney finally signed his severance agreement in August 2001. Still, Romney’s name continued to appear as CEO and owner on dozens of Bain fund documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission until January 2002. No one would succeed Romney as CEO of Bain Capital. To this day, Bain is run by a management committee.
He was CEO from 1999-2002. Deal with it, Glenn.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
Now, Cole, really. The Villagers are not required to deal with inconvenient facts (which St. Ronnie noted are stupid). Only the little people need concern themselves with objective reality.
dmsilev
Kessler has given up and declared that there is no answer:
In a sane world, this should result in him getting canned from his FactChecker(tm) position. “Is it true?” “No idea”.
Southern Beale
What a fucking day it’s been. I’ve got my roundup of good news posted, if anyone feels like they’re tired of the bullshit.
Hunter Gathers
He’s going to rate the latest Romney ad about that ‘magic word gaffe’ Obama made as ‘mostly true’. Keep fucking that chicken, you offspring of plutocrats.
feebog
You can’t be President, CEO and Sole Shareholder in a company and claim you have nothing to do with the company. It flies in the face of common business practice, not to mention good old common sense. This is going to continue to perculate, although I think the tax returns are a bigger issue.
GoodGuyGreg
It’s funny because he seems more concerned with finding some technicality that will prove he was right to believe Romney instead of admitting he’s been wrong about this all along.
Xecky Gilchrist
He was CEO from 1999-2002.
Indeed, it is central to my point.
hueyplong
So in sum, Kessler’s position is that we can’t know what was in Willard’s mind when he said contradictory things, so it’s impossible to tell which is the lie, therefore neither can be called one and, best of all, we can’t even call them contradictory. Because it’s murky. Impasse.
Just how much whoring does Kessler have to do before it’s ok to call him a whore?
patroclus
Mr. Kessler’s reputation is in the toilet. We aren’t at an “impasse.” Romney was CEO, sole shareholder, chairman of the board and President of Bain until 2002. This is contrary to Romney’s statements and to Kessler’s prior “fact-checking.” Romney is unequivocally responsible for Bain’s horrific activities through his departure in 2002.
jwb
@dmsilev: Did he retroactively pull the Pinocchios already assigned?
Edited for style.
Valdivia
not to put too fine a point on it–if it’s too murky why the fuck did he call Obama’s ad a lie?
head hits desk countless times.
Tony J
Have any of these ‘facts’ been confirmed by a GOP former member of Bain Capital? No? Then they’re clearly partisan.
And anyway, Kessler already called Obama a liar. If he were to call Romney a liar as well that would leave him open to accusations of ‘faux-balance’, and his credibility as a fact-checker might be called into question. And we can’t have that, can we?
dmsilev
@jwb: Of course not. That paragraph on quantum truthiness came at the end of a long post summarizing all of the Pinocchios issued to date on the subject of Bain.
eemom
damn, and here I thought you’d finally learned him, when he gave Romtron 4 pinnochios the other day for the crap about Obama’s investments.
Keep hammering, Cole. You do have some influence, it seems.
rollotomasi
apologies if this has been posted previously. Buzzfeed caught Romey in the GOP debates saying he was at Bain for 25years. 1977 + 25 years = 2002
http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/in-primary-debate-romney-suggested-he-was-at-bain
dedc79
And let’s remember, he was happy to call Obama a liar without doing any homework. Ten days of beating him over the head with an encyclopedia of evidence and he still won’t call Romney out
Yutsano
@Valdivia: Now I know who you remind me of: Stixen. Five foot nothing spitfire of a drummer from Arizona State and a no-nonsense kind of gal. You’d love her!
PS:Stixen is a nickname. She’d kill me for revealing her true identity. :)
jwb
@dmsilev: If we were in a farce rather than reality, it would be delightful to think that Kessler obsessively returns to this topic just because he likes getting his ass kicked so much.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Struggling to look past the bizarrely self-important, even self-parodic, discussion of “withholding Pinnochios”, this chuckleheaded trust fund baby sounds like he’s trying to say “Opinions differ: Shape of the Earth debatable”
VincentN
“What is truth?” Kessler asked. “Can one really ‘know’ anything in this world? Is reality not merely a state of mind?”
jwb
OT, saw this on Twitter and hauled up from a previous thread: Stephanie Cutter retroactively apologizes and retires. “We don’t have the budget for nuance.”
Jewish Steel
Imagine gazing into the mirror every morning and thinking, “I am an awarder of Pinocchios.”
Calouste
So, how did Romney end up with 100% of Bain Capital anyway? Why did Mr. Bain from Bain & co not get a share of it, even if it was only for using the name (and obviously providing the Rolodex) and giving Mitt the guarantee that he could come back in the fold at BainCo if his marvelous adventure at BainCap went tits up? Why did the early partners in BainCap just accept a salary and a share in the profits rather than a share in the company (which would actually make them partners)?
sharl
@Jewish Steel:
Hahaha, someone needs to produce a farcical movie about all this, just so that line – with proper visuals – gets the exposure and pseudo-immortality it deserves.
Dave L
I’m expecting Kessler to start dipping into Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy as a way of parsing the distinctions here. Signing documents, negotiating deals, letting Bain present him to the world as CEO — those are all merely the accidents of CEO-ness. In the essentials, his substance was transformed in 1999, presumably into the condition of retroactively-resigned ex-CEO in waiting.
Yutsano
Being a Villager means never having to admit you’re wrong. It’s not like he’ll get fired for it.
Randy P
@rollotomasi: It’s a matter of opinion as to when Romney started Bain. It’s also a matter of opinion as to whether 1975 + 25 = 2002. What is an unequivocal fact is that Romney said he wasn’t there, ipso facto he wasn’t.
Did I do that right?
Randy P
@rollotomasi: It’s a matter of opinion as to when Romney started Bain. It’s also a matter of opinion as to whether 1977 + 25 = 2002. What is an unequivocal fact is that Romney said he wasn’t there, ipso facto he wasn’t.
Did I do that right?
Halteclere
Test (sorry)
rp
Kessler has essentially conceded. We should declare victory.
freelancer
@Jewish Steel:
Comment of the Year nominee.
handy
I just love how the Globe has been relentlessly pressing on this they are giving Mitt no daylight.
El Cid
When Mitt Romney is shone through a set of slits in an opaque material, he appears in an interference pattern. This shows the inherent Bain / Non-Bain duality, because at other times, and under other conditions, this wave behavior collapses and he appears as a complete prick.
Jay in Oregon
Even if Romney was just the sole shareholder until 2002 and actually had no official role in the company (regardless of inconvenient SEC filings saying otherwise), he was still in a position to stop all of the investments and business decisions that he doesn’t want to be held responsible for.
If the owner of the company didn’t want his company investing in Stericycle, I’m pretty sure he can hire and fire anyone up to and including the mysterious phantom executives that were acting as President and/or CEO.
El Cid
@handy: I think there’s something about him running for office as though he was never Governor of Massachusetts and none of that is important. Can you imagine how insulting that is to, say, the Boston Globe, which covered you during that time a lot?
Thomas DeVito
@Dave L: I think you mean Ptolemy. I think busting out the overly complex theory of retrograde movement to explain
how the sun actually rotates around the earthhow Mitt wasn’t CEO despite being CEO, is the way forward.FlipYrWhig
So, to recap, Kessler’s whole thing was that it was inappropriate to hold Romney responsible for things that Bain did between 1999 and 2002 because, while Bain did do them, and Romney was CEO, Chair, owner, etc., Bain’s bad acts can’t be laid at Romney’s feet because he didn’t personally arrange them. That’s already stupid enough, I think.
But as far as truth in advertising goes, even if you buy it 100% Kessler’s way, it seems to be indisputably true that there’s nothing erroneous about claiming something like “When Mitt Romney was CEO of Bain Capital, Bain capital laid off X number of workers or outsourced Y number of jobs.” Romney could fight about whether that was _fair_, but it wouldn’t be _untrue_.
Likewise, it wouldn’t be untrue to say “While Obama was president, the US suffered job losses of [whatever amount]” if that actually happened; Obama would simply have to say, “true, but it wasn’t my doing.” Debating who or what was most responsible for something that actually happened is valid, and maybe even productive, but “fact checking” shouldn’t have anything to do with that beyond corroborating that the thing in question actually happened.
As other people have said, Kessler seems to struggle on the distinction between true/false, fair/unfair, and nice/mean.
JPL
hahahahaahahahahahahahahahahaahhaahahaha
and I thought I was naive..
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@jwb: LOL!
FlipYrWhig
@Thomas DeVito: He should have been the head of Schrodinger Capital, where he’s both in charge and not in charge until someone opens the box (full of tax returns).
Jewish Steel
@freelancer:
From a past winner no less!
Roy G.
How partisan and unseemly this roguish japing! You people are the reason why Mitt won’t release his tax returns. How dare you use the facts of his life to disagree with his august personage! Pinocchios for all who dare to usurp the truth from whatever His Mittness decrees to be so today!
Thomas DeVito
@FlipYrWhig: Ha, I actually loled at that.
Tony J
@handy:
The comment section in that Globe piece is basically unreadable. Lots and lots of wingnuts throwing poop against the walls and Kesslering for all they’re worth. Panic? They haz it.
Litlebritdifrnt
@jwb:
Ha I was just about to link to that very vid. It is brilliant.
texascowgirl
Willard Romney lies about everything! Remember that $100 million he raised in June?
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/20/12861041-obama-campaign-raises-46m-in-june-romney-takes-in-33m?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
Mitt Romney’s campaign raised $33 million in June, according to its Federal Election Commission filing on Friday, accounting for about a third of the $106 million Republicans had boasted raising last month.
The presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s haul was his largest monthly total to date, but fell well short of the $46 million raised by President Obama’s campaign during the same period.
LOL!
NCSteve
I’ve really moved beyond the point where I think this is all because he trembles before the might of our Galtian Overlords and have concluded its all about him. That he’s just one of those people who just cannot admit they were wrong about something. And obviously, a person with that kind of fragile ego personality defect is just the fucking kind of person you’d want running a “fact checking” column, because being an arbiter of truth can only help that kind of a problem, right?
It’s the way he gets so prissily defensive and will tie himself into knots that would create pain for Mr. Fantastic to avoid admitting he was wrong that says he’s just one of those neverwrong types like that that guy you know who doesn’t understand why his third wife just left him.
Violet
Defining Romney as a liar and a coward is a good thing. The longer Kessler refuses to see that the sky is blue, the longer the whole story stays out in the Village. And the more people point out that “Romeny lied, Kessler! You’re an idiot!” That’s a good thing.
PeakVT
Check out this footnote describing the ownership structure of Domino’s for Romney’s share of it in the 1990s.
Maybe he thinks giving birth to a lot of paper companies will help him get to a higher level of heaven.
freelancer
@Jewish Steel:
Wait? When did I win comment of the year?! This is news to me. Maybe I missed that thread.
Calouste
OT, but George W. Bush is not going to attend the coronation of W. Mitt Romney:
“He supports Gov. Romney and wants him to succeed,” George W. Bush spokesperson Freddy Ford told Politico Friday in a statement confirmed by TPM.
WaterGirl
@jwb: Asking the same question I asked on the previous thread… is that really Stephanie Cutter? It’s not, I think, but I don’t know who it is.
Turgidson
@feebog:
We can’t know for sure how big an issue the tax returns are unless we see them or learn that there’s a whole buncha rich guy thieving bullshit in them (I mean, more than we already suspect).
The Bain timeline, however, proves with documentation, signed by Mittens himself under penalty of perjury, that he is a lying sack of shit. And when confronted with proof of his shitty lies, he shits out more shitty lies. And then accuses the Obama campaign of lying, which itself is a shitty lie. Call me old-fashioned, but that fucking matters to me.
God dammit, the Bush administration spent most of its 8 years lying its ass off and/or scaring the shit out of the country (often both at the same time). I don’t want to deal with another lying sack of shit so soon.
maya
Do we have the makings for a new oath at court trials?
“I swear to tell the kessler, the whole kessler and nothing but the kessler, so help me God.”
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@texascowgirl:
And in July, it’ll be the other Koch brother’s turn.
jl
” At Some Point, Glenn Kessler is Just Going to Have to Admit He Was Wrong
By John Cole July 20th, 2012 ”
No, he doesn’t. I rate Mr. Cole’s statement as untrue.
He should. But he doesn’t have to and good chance he won’t. He is a made man and has a racket to run.
khead
I’m pretty sure this has been mentioned before by some folks here, but I’d say it’s clear that Romney certainly pissed the Globe off at some point.
Drip, drip, drip.
elm
There’s two problems here: first, he’ll never admit it; second, Kessler wasn’t wrong (which carries connotations that one intended to be correct) so much as lying or, if I was feeling charitable, dissembling.
JWL
@dmsilev: In other words, “Let us look forward, not back”.
jwb
@WaterGirl: It was put together by Second City. The credits in the YouTube link say it stars Janel Benisch.
Tonal Crow
@VincentN:
“On the other hand,” he continued, “I should be cautious about such blatant resort to postmodernism. I know that Democrats are lying. Whether Republicans might possibly be able to consider the remote possibility of uttering a statement whose truth a far-left Obamunist would consider untrue, I cannot know, for I cannot know a Republican’s heart, except that they’re all good. In any case, all such questions are purely in the realms of the theoretical, if not the theological. Therefore I judge all Democrat ads mostly false.”
cmorenc
Folks: Colorado as sucked 99% of the media and public’s attention for national news at the moment. The Bain thing/tax thing will be in the shadows for two or three, maybe even foru days. However, it a a temporary eclipse like that of the moon, rather than any sign it’s corralled in a cave.
Tonal Crow
@El Cid:
Win!
WaterGirl
@jwb: Thank you!
Felanius Kootea
@Southern Beale: Thanks; I needed that.
slag
@Xecky Gilchrist:
Ha! I didn’t know fascists had senses of humor. Nicely done, son of Stalin.
Sarah, Proud and Tall
@Calouste:
I love you.
Jewish Steel
@freelancer: Weirdly, we’ve had a conversation like this before. I have no recollection of it.
I’m only 43. A little early for the little grey cells to be going rogue.
Anyway, I’ve never walked 528 feet in her shoes will always be comment of the year in my heart.
Sarah, Proud and Tall
@El Cid:
You also I love.
freelancer
@Jewish Steel:
I’m a bit younger, yet I totally forgot about that too. Juicers bring out the funny in me, I guess. You all just set the bar so high.
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
i haven’t been around enough to even remember which bit player in a bigger story john is servicing this week.
Yutsano
@Sarah, Proud and Tall: Harem expansion again?
Oh and hi dear. Got stuck minding Alaskans. Pretty bored.
James E. Powell
@cmorenc:
The Bain thing/tax thing will be in the shadows for two or three, maybe even four days. However, it a a temporary eclipse like that of the moon, rather than any sign it’s corralled in a cave.
I’m not so sure. I think the Village has been aching for a reason to get off this story. When the coverage of the shooting in Colorado starts to fade, Romney’s campaign and the right-wing media will start with “Is he still talking about that? We already proved he was lying. Let’s move on to what this election is really about.” And the corporate press/media will follow them, just like they always do.
Only ‘new information’ on either Bain or the tax returns will bring those stories back to the temperature they were cooking at two days ago.
Caz
Assuming you’re 100% correct about Romney’s role with Bain, my question is….so what??
You think the American people are going to tune in all over the nation to hear this conclusion after the liberals investigation turns up the true story: “Romney was CEO of a company from 1999 to 2002.”
Big deal, lol. I don’t know why you are all so intrigued by this, as if it’s going to torpedo his campaign. I know you’re all looking for some smoking gun to ruin Romney’s chances of getting elected, but let me tell you, proving he was CEO of a private company is really not going to have any impact on anything, lol. I’m amazed you people don’t realize that.
I think maybe you’re spending too much time staying within your liberal circles making you think that this is a huge issue. In the rest of the country, outside your little echo chamber and BJ discussions, people don’t care when he was CEO. We already know he’s rich and ran a venture capital firm. You really think “exposing” the years during which he was CEO is even slightly interesting to anyone other than liberals? It’s not.
Even among liberals, I don’t see the relevance or significance of it. Is it that you caught him in a lie? Even then, big deal. He’s lied before on much more significant things, and he’ll lie again. Obama lies all the time and has been doing so for four years. Politicians lie, and lying about which years he ran a company we already know he was CEO of is totally uninteresting.
It’s not like he was engaged in anything illegal or even immoral.
If this is the best you’ve got on Romney, then he’s a shoe-in for November.
Keep up the good Scooby-Doo stuff, lol.
Sarah, Proud and Tall
@Yutsano:
People, dogs or bombes?
Hello. I’m into the weekend already down here. How are you, dear?
Sarah, Proud and Tall
@Caz:
I love that you think that the concepts of “committed perjury” or “lied in legal documents” are too difficult for the average voter to understand. What a sad world you live in.
Villago Delenda Est
So, how long has Kessler been fucking that chicken?
Going on what, 10 days now?
He must be chafing something fierce.
slightly_peeved
@Caz:
Well in this case, since he clearly lied to the FEC (he said he had no role in Bain, which is clearly a lie given recent evidence), it should be quite interesting to the FBI. And it shouldn’t matter what the voters think, since given the evidence already unearthed Romney should be in jail. Like the people mentioned here, sent to jail for lying to the FEC. Not holding my breath, though.
James E. Powell
@Caz:
Assuming you’re 100% correct about Romney’s role with Bain, my question is….so what??
Why not ask Romney? He’s the one lying about it. He’s the one who is desperately fighting any effort to establish the truth.
If he only wanted to continue his life as a rich asshole, I’d be okay with him keeping his secrets. But he is asking people who do not know him to trust him.
Dexter's new approach
I’ve lost count of how many CEOs I’ve met with, plus all the other finance guys I was forced to socialize with (I was shocked at how many were obviously bad people.) I can’t imagine any of them just letting go of their baby.
Sure Romney, as a Mormon and future President candidate, wanted the 2002 Olympics to go well (I was there as a guest of a Boston bank, and it was borrrrring), but I don’t believe for a second that he didn’t keep constant communication with Bain the whole time. It’s just not in these guy’s DNA to let it go.
TenguPhule
So Caz will retroactively declare Clinton was a total saint then.
LosGatosCA
“At Some Point, Glenn Kessler is Just Going to Have to Admit He Was Wrong”
Love your optimism.
Put this in the file with “At Some Point,
– Cheney will have to admit he’s a war criminal
– Bush will have to admit he’s the worst president ever
– John McCain will have to admit he lost the election in 2008
– Scooter Libby will have to admit he’s a convicted felon
– Ben Bernanke will have to admit he doesn’t actually give a shit about one single unemployed person
– the Republican Party will have to admit that they would rather see America in a complete state of nihilistic ruin they caused than have a legitimate Democratic elected president
– the states of Mississippi and Alabama will have to admit that their right to work laws and unfunded public school systems are not the way to increase the median income in their states
– Robert Rubin will have to admit he laid the foundation for the complete financial destruction of the world economy