After taking flak from his Republican Primary rivals, Mitt Romney today released two years of information about his taxes, hundreds of pages of financial details which the candidate says will not create any negative news stories.
"First of all, Governor Romney pays millions in taxes each year," said campaign attorney Ben Ginsburg."
The release came after Romney had repeatedly hedged on when and what he would release - answers that gave him trouble at two debates last week in South Carolina.
On a conference call with reporters this morning, Romney aides said the documents would show that Romney had an effective tax rate of 13.9% in 2010 and 15.4% in 2011.
They repeatedly emphasized that Romney had paid all of the taxes he was supposed to and rejected assertions that he had somehow used foreign investments to hide income from the U.S. Government.
But critics said words like "Cayman Islands" and "Swiss bank account" could prove troublesome for Romney, as both parties looked to see what they could find in the mountain of information.
To take a look for yourself, you can see the Romney tax returns at the bottom of this page on the Romney campaign web site.
If nothing troublesome comes out of this release, then we might have just witnessed yet another example of how political attacks can be made on a candidate who resists releasing tax return information, but then the story quickly dies after that material is actually made public.
We'll now see whether that's true in 2012 for Mitt Romney, or will his critics - especially the Democrats - use it for more political jabs.
