Noted monitor of tax returns releases no tax returns

Democrats believe they’ve found a tasty bone to gnaw on in terms of Mitt Romney not yet releasing all of his tax returns. Given the nation’s appetite for openness about the history of presidential candidates, this may well be a debate we can have, but there might be just one tiny problem with the agent they sent out to carry the torch on this one. DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Shultz showed up for an interview on WCVB-BOS (ABC) in Boston, MA on Monday to read the riot act on Mitt. After complaining about various perceived sins of the rich and Romney’s insufficient number of released tax returns, the reporter, Janet Wu, brought up an uncomfortable point. (Transcript cleaned up for typos, original available at the link.)

WU: Are you the best attack dog on this particular issue considering you have never released your tax.

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: Absolutely, I’m not running for president.

WU: You are a public official.

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: I file full financial disclosure required under the law. Mitt Romney is actually the first candidate in modern history to only release one year of a tax return.

We can, as I said, have a perfectly valid public discussion about precisely how many years of tax returns or other such personal documents candidates should release when asking the voting public for their support. But in this case, we have one member of the United States Congress calling out a former governor who seeks to be President of the United States. And if I’m doing the math correctly here, the person who releases one year of tax returns has released, proportionally, more than the person who has released zero years by a factor of…

My calculator just exploded. I’ll get back to you.

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