Romney failed to disclose Swiss bank account on financial forms

You know who this doesn’t benefit?

“An amendment is being filed to address this minor discrepancy,” a campaign official told ABC News in an email Thursday in response to questions about the apparent omission.

The discovery that the Romneys had $3 million in an account with the Swiss bank UBS came only after the Republican presidential candidate released his tax returns for 2010 on Tuesday. The campaign had maintained that it was not necessary to disclose the Swiss account because Romney’s money manager, Brad Malt, had shuttered it in early 2010.

Several Republican election lawyers told ABC News Thursday that the account still needed to be disclosed because a Romney trust earned about $1,700 in income on the account during 2010. The campaign’s decision to amend the forms was first reported by the Los Angeles Times.

Go figure that Team Mitt wasn’t eager to advertise a Swiss bank account just as the class war to end all class wars, starring Mitt Romney as the Monopoly guy in Democratic attacks ads, is heating up. Follow the link up top and read down a bit and you’ll see that Newt actually has a shady nondisclosure problem of his own — somehow more than a quarter million dollars of wages he earned from one of his holding companies went unreported on his own financial forms. Kudos to whichever eagle-eyed lawyers and/or accountants in the Gingrich campaign spotted the issue with Romney’s Swiss bank account and fed it to the media. It’s a brilliant bit of distraction from Newt’s error, and it sets Newt up perfectly to push his class attacks on Mitt at tonight’s debate. A sneak preview from the Times:

“I think someone who owns stock in a place that forecloses on Floridians has a lot of gall to start raising the issue,” Mr. Gingrich said. “We ought to find how much money has he made over the years foreclosing on Floridians.”

Mr. Gingrich was referring to a report on, of all places, the left-leaning Web site Think Progress on Wednesday, which claimed that an examination of Mr. Romney’s personal financial disclosure from last year showed he and his wife owned shares of a Goldman Sachs fund that invested in mortgage-backed securities. It linked the fund to “thousands” of foreclosure proceedings against Floridians…

“We have to ultimately focus on beating Barack Obama,” he said, “but we’re not going to beat Barack Obama with some guy who has Swiss bank accounts, Cayman Island accounts, owns shares of Goldman Sachs that forecloses on Floridians, is himself a stock-holder in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while he tries to think the rest of us are too stupid to put together the dots to understand what this is all about.”

Romney has an interest in a mutual fund that owns shares in Fannie and Freddie, but there’s some confusion about whether he controls the fund’s shares or whether a trustee does. The lefty PAC American Bridge points to this Boston Globe article from September alleging that, unlike most of his investments (which are held by a blind trust), Romney does in fact control the Fannie/Freddie fund. Earlier this week, though, Romney’s campaign said that isn’t true, that a trustee handles it. Maybe the funds were transferred from Romney to the trust between then and now? It’s bizarre to me that his trustee would have had the political savvy to shut down the Swiss bank account because it looked bad for Romney’s campaign but that Romney himself would have maintained a mutual fund investment in, of all things, the engines that drove the global financial crisis. Whoever’s managing the Fannie/Freddie fund now should have dumped it ages ago, especially given how small the investment is. $250-500,000 is chump change for Romney.

If only there was a potential VP out there whose own personal trouble with mortgages could shield Romney by adding an in-touch-with-the-people element to the ticket. If only. While we wait for the debate, here’s the terrible, terrible new anti-Romney video from MoveOn.org starring Justin Long (the Apple guy in the “I’m an Apple, I’m a PC” commercials). If this is what the left has in the pipe for fall, we can rest easy, my friends.

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