Robert Gibbs, a senior adviser to the Obama campaign, continued his attack on Mitt Romney's overseas financial holdings on Monday, suggesting at one point that any misleading information in his financial disclosures “is actually punishable under federal criminal law.”
Although he backed away from the claim that the presumptive Republican nominee was guilty of a felony, Gibbs called on Romney to release more tax returns in name of transparency.
“Is somebody who has sheltered their income taxes in Switzerland and the Caymans and Bermuda really somebody who's going to get under the hood and get us to a place of tax fairness?” he said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “We need to know why he's got that money there.”
Romney senior advisor Dan Senor shot back at Gibbs, saying that Romney has, in fact, released a sufficient number of tax returns.
“The reason we know about these accounts, as Robert knows, the reason we know about these accounts is because they are in the tax returns that Mitt Romney released,” Senor said. “It wasn't like the Obama campaign opposition researchers went down to Bermuda or because reporters dug this up.”
Gibbs scoffed at Senor’s suggestion of transparency: “A notion that somehow Mitt Romney has been transparent about the fact that he's offshored money all over this world is patently ridiculous,” he said.
Monday was the second day that Democrats criticized Romney's finances, suggesting that the Obama campaign is not yielding on this issue any time soon. On Sunday, Democrats, including Gibbs and Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, hit Romney over his foreign earnings on the Sunday news shows.
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