In this morning's NBC-Facebook Republican debate on Meet the Press, David Gregory tried to give Mitt Romney a pass while going after Newt Gingrich's SuperPAC for airing a 27-minute video about Mitt Romney's involvement with Bain Capital and their nasty habit of stripping companies of assets before bankrupting them and putting thousands out of work.
What is interesting about this particular exchange is how Romney first claims he hasn't seen the ads aired by his SuperPAC, has no knowledge of the details and of course feels that anything untrue should be corrected. As soon as those words leave his mouth, he spends the next 30 seconds enumerating every contention in the ads and defending them, and he's quite specific.
So which is it? Was he aware of the content of the ads or not? Clearly he was. All of them were, and this is why the whole Citizens United decision is such a farce. Romney quite defiantly embraces the fact that the ads are paid for by his supporters and the SuperPAC is run by former staffers. He knows every detail of the ads. Yet he stood before that audience with a straight face and claimed to have no knowledge of specifics or inaccuracies.
I realize Mitt Romney isn't particularly concerned with facts. I also know it's difficult to keep track of which lies one has told, which is why the truth usually works better. But one of his staffers might want to remind him of his self-righteous statement to Laura Ingraham where he says quite clearly that he helped raise money to put those ads on the air. Take what he said and mix it with the level of detailed knowledge he has about these ads and then decide for yourself whether there's any coordination between Romney, his campaign, and his SuperPAC.
By the way, Newt wasn't much better. He claimed to be innocent of the specific details in the 27-minute long video his SuperPAC has about Bain Capital, and then also went on to enumerate what Bain has done.
It's all a joke, thanks to our US Supreme Court. After watching this clip and the overall discussion, the idea that campaigns don't coordinate with SuperPACs is nothing more than a pack of lies.
Transcript after the jump.
