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Harry Reid who's a Mormon himself is not backing down from demanding that Mitt Romney release years of his tax returns which he has refused to do.

After creating a political firestorm and being accused of lying, U.S. Sen. Harry Reid on Monday refused to back down from his challenge to GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney to release his income tax returns to prove he paid every year. Reid raised the stakes last week when he said a source who invested in Bain Capital told him Romney hadn't paid taxes for 10 years.

Reid said he didn't know If that was true but said Romney ought to release his returns to demonstrate he had paid. Romney was co-founder of the Bain investment firm and its CEO in the 1980s and 1990s.Asked Monday if Reid had been in touch with his source and if the man was willing to go public with evidence, Reid turned the question back on Romney."This whole issue is not about me," Reid said at a news conference after he helped dedicate a new VA hospital in Southern Nevada.

Reid noted Romney's father, George, had released 12 years of tax returns when he ran for president in 1968. And he added that Mitt Romney has released only one full year return, which Reid said showed he had overseas bank accounts in the Bahamas and Switzerland, raising questions about what Romney is trying to hide."The whole controversy would end very quickly if he would just release his income tax returns just like everybody else that runs for president," Reid said.

The media needs to keep pressuring Romney to release his tax information. If candidate Obama had released only a couple of years of tax returns in 2008, he would have been hounded into releasing more by FOX and every other media outlet because it would appear that he's hiding something. They are insipidly demanding that Obama release his college information for God's sake. Romney is definitely afraid of something major or else he would have squashed this controversy immediately. I don't understand why Kevin Drum and others are already saying Mitt didn't do anything illegal. Why?

Henry Blodget says he doesn't think Mitt Romney is trying to hide anything illegal by refusing to release his tax returns. Rather, he thinks Romney simply doesn't want it to become clear just how carefully he's structured his income over the years.

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Like Blodget, I also doubt that Romney has done anything illegal, and probably not anything that's even too close to the line. And yet, it somehow seems as though there must be a little more there than just evidence of aggressive tax avoidance. Blodget thinks that would outrage the American public, but I'm not sure I buy that unless there's some pretty shady stuff there. But then again, I'm not exactly plugged into the id of the average American. Maybe Blodget is right.

So many companies and rich elites have gone down because of illegal and fraudulent practices that it's not a reach to suggest illegal practices took place. Romney should be pounded over and over again as Harry Reid is doing. If there's nothing illegal in Romney's tax returns then he should prove it. Mittens must feel that revealing the truth about his finances will hurt him tremendously in the eyes of the American public. The media also needs to keep digging into this story and not rely on a Senator to kick up a firestorm to keep the story alive.