In case you’ve forgotten, the date the hackers who allegedly stole Mitt Romney’s tax records gave to release them to the public unless they received a million-dollar ransom is coming up tomorrow, September 28.
It’s been widely assumed that Mitt refuses to release the returns because there’s something in there he’s trying to hide. So what’s the story? Are these hackers about to unleash holy hell on the Romney campaign? Will tomorrow be a game-changer in the election?
Well, the last we heard from the hackers was a September 8 update that indicated a million-dollar payout requested from the Romney camp to destroy the files had not been received. “We have received quite a bit of Bitcoins on either side,” the group said on Pastebin, referring to two different anonymous payment accounts they’d created—one to release the records and one to destroy them. The group claimed whichever reached a million dollars first would dictate the fate of the records. If neither reached a million, they promised to release them on September 28. “The option to release information publicly is in the lead,” they said on September 8. “It seems that we have become of great interest to the media and due to a few security issues we have updated the BTC wallet addresses. Time is running out.”
PriceWaterhouseCooper said they saw no evidence they’d been breached, but that of course doesn’t mean anything. If the tax records aren’t released tomorrow, we’ll have no definitive way of knowing whether the hackers were bluffing the whole time or whether they’d received the million dollar ransom before the deadline.
Either way, Bloomberg recently uncovered something Romney might have been wanting to hide:
Turns out his $250 million worth as stated by the campaign actually doesn’t include a cleverly tax-free trust he set up for his kids worth at least another $100 million.
A particular type of trust hilariously nicknamed an “I Dig It” trust after its acronym IDGT, it allowed Romney to grant his kids a large amount of stock in DoubleClick shortly before it went public, and then sell the stock after Google bought the company for $3.2 billion without his kids paying any tax at all. Exactly how much the $100M trust generates Bloomberg describes as being almost impossible to discern through public record.
After all the talk about how those who avoid paying taxes are “dependent” on government and believe they are “victims,” this can’t look good for Romney’s image.
We may learn more tomorrow. Stay tuned!
September 27, 2012 at 7:58 pm, DREGstudios! Art & Design said:
Romney’s tax rate is still HALF of the AVERAGE Middle Class American! This is the epitome of GREED. There's no doubt a Romney administration would favor the rich and increase the income gap in our country? Mitt is a pariah in Mormon Clothing and will stop at nothing to expand tax cuts for the 1% of the wealthiest Americans. He’s out to gut the Middle Class for every red cent he can get. Will his sacred Mormon underwear grant him the protection and money to buy this election? See for yourself as Mitt dons his tighty-whities sent down from the Good Lord Himself at http://dregstudiosart.blogspot.com/2012/05/mitt-romneys-magic-mormon-underwear.html.
September 28, 2012 at 3:20 pm, Milton Rodas said:
I think these guys are not going to release anything at all. I've been also waiting (and hoping) that they were not a fraud and would release them after not receiving the Bitcoin money that they demanded.
Here are my findings from my research on these guys as of yesterday:
Supposedly, on Sept. 20th, "Anonymous" posted the Private Keys to their Bitcoin Wallets, exposing them and scaring them: http://pastebin.com/zPUTFmeP… It seems Anonymous was upset that hackers would try to profit from information, as they promote making all information free and not for profit.
The same day, the hackers (who go by the alias "Dr. Evil"), declared that an anonymous buyer had purchased the information with 'real' money…not bitcoins: http://pastebin.com/5b3KAkyp…
This all came after the hacker group (Dr. Evil) had supposedly addressed media questions on Sept. 8th: http://pastebin.com/pfcqiKWX… Keep in mind, we don't know if this was ever true at all. Also, all the pastes done on pastebin.com could be from the same user pretending to be both, Anonymous and Dr. Evil, and wanting to just escape and get the secret service to stop hunting them down, etc.
Supposedly, however, about 20 media outlets have the documents and only need the key to access them. Were those documents EVER real? Who knows and maybe we will never know. We will see…
September 29, 2012 at 1:52 pm, Sue Deaunym said:
My assumption all along has been that Romney, or some of his GOP handlers, concocted this story of hacked returns so that they would be less aggressively demanded by Democrats and the media. If the clamor for Mitt's taxes didn't die down, they'd release them on their own, making it seem as if anonymous or Dr.Evil did it, so that Romney would not seem to have caved in to political demand, and would be perceived as a victim himself.