Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev) ignited a firestorm last week repeating unsubstantiated claims that Republican presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney failed to pay taxes for ten years, which he says are based on information from an anonymous Bain Capital investor.
Reid admits he is not sure if the accusations are true and refuses to disclose the identity of his source, yet according Romney surrogate John Sununu Reid's "credible" sources is actually Barack Obama and his campaign team.
Reid "probably developed the accusation as he was "talking to the mirror while he was shaving," says Sunumu, who suspects the White House is behind the allegations because Obama launched similar attacks against Sen. John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin during the 2008 campaign.
“The Obama campaign and President Obama are the ones that are behind this dishonesty and misrepresentation because they are trying to hide the failure of this abysmal presidency that we have had in office the last four years,” says Sununu. "He was encouraged to do stuff like this by [Obama strategist David] Axelrod, by the president, and by the White House," he said, "this is the way they operate. It is Chicago-style gutter politics trying to hide the failure that they have had for the last four years.”
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney did not denunciate the accusations against Romney but said that Reid “speaks for himself”, had spoken on the issue without any guidance from Team Obama and that President Obama has not expressed an opinion on Reid’s recent comments.
Romney personally responded to Reid's attacks calling on the Senate Majority leader to "put up or shut up" and has released two years of IRS filing, but that is not enough to satisfy the Democrats.
Republican National Committte chairman Reince Priebus slammed Reid calling him a "dirty liar" who hasn’t filed a single page of tax returns himself and "complains about people with money but lives in the Ritz Carlton here down the street."
"The Romney campaign and Gov. Romney can resolve this in ten seconds, they can release the tax returns," says top Obama adviser David Axelrod."They gave 23 years of tax returns to the John McCain campaing in 2008, they've given one year of tax returns to the American people. Why don't they just put this to rest? Why are they hiding?"
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says Reid is not lying and arues Reid was just repeating an allegation he heard from someone else.
"Harry Reid made a statement that is true," said Pelosi, " somebody told him, it is a fact."
Worker's Voice, the largest union affiliated super PAC of the AFL-CIO, is supporting the Democrat party and Reid in the fight over Romney's tax returns launching an online petition to support the chareges made by Reid with plans to protest Romney events while calling on him to release more tax returns.
Romney's campaign appears unable to move past the debate over the presumptive nominee's personal finances.
Democrats must be unable to find any personal dirt on him, so they are resorting to propaganda of complicated tax filings and boring financial records, going back decades, to create the illusion of scandal .
Obama's usual campaign strategy has been to pry into the private records of his opponents, as lawyer and syndicated columnist Ann Coulter details.
Democrats are either supporting these baseless claims overtly or tacitly with silence.
"There is a word for people who publicize defamatory insinuations or allegation just to get them into circulation, without knowing or caring whether they are true," writes the Washington Examiner, "that word 'slanderer' is appropriate here."