Obama To Romney: Five Years Of Tax Returns Would Suffice

via Elizabeth Hewitt and Abby Ohlheiser, Slate

The Obama campaign has an offer for Team Romney: Release five years’ worth of tax returns and they’ll stop asking to see more.

Obama campaign manager Jim Messina released an open letter to the candidate on Friday outlining the deal: “If the governor will release five years of returns, I commit in turn that we will not criticize him for not releasing more—neither in ads nor in other public communications or commentary for the rest of the campaign.” The promise is a response to the Romney campaign’s assertion that releasing any more returns would encourage Democrats to ask for even more returns, the New York Times explains.

The Romney campaign responded with an open letter of their own to Messina, indicating that they’re not going to bite: “It is clear that President Obama wants nothing more than to talk about Governor Romney’s tax returns, instead of the issues that matter to voters, like putting Americans back to work, fixing the economy and reining in spending,” reads the letter quoted by Politico.

Thursday, Aug. 16: Mitt Romney told reporters Thursday that he has paid at least 13 percent in income taxes annually over the past decade, comments that represent the most information the presumptive GOP nominee has offered on the subject to date.

“I did go back and look at my taxes, and over the past 10 years I never paid less than 13 percent,” Romney told reporters while stumping in South Carolina. “I think the most recent year is 13.6 or something like that. So I paid taxes every single year.”

Democrats have pummeled the former Massachusetts governor with calls to make his past tax returns public, including a recent—undocumented—claim by Sen. Harry Reid that Romney avoided paying taxes entirely for a decade while working at Bain Capital.

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