Yes, he adds the caveat that this claim comes from an anonymous "Bain investor", and he makes sure to throw in an "I don't know if it's true or not" disclaimer...but it's a HELL of a charge to toss out there, and not the sort of thing that Harry Reid is prone to saying, especially in a public interview:
Harry Reid: Bain Investor Told Me That Mitt Romney 'Didn't Pay Any Taxes For 10 Years
WASHINGTON -- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has what he says is an informed explanation for why Mitt Romney refuses to release additional tax returns. According a Bain investor, Reid charged, Romney didn't pay any taxes for 10 years.
In a wide-ranging interview with The Huffington Post from his office on Capitol Hill, Reid saved some of his toughest words for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. Romney couldn't make it through a Senate confirmation process as a mere Cabinet nominee, the majority leader insisted, owing to the opaqueness of his personal finances
I hope to God that Harry is right about this--OR, at the very least, that Romney never provides proof that he's wrong--because if he's wrong, and it turns out that Romney did pay at least a double-digit percentage (10% or higher) in taxes, this is gonna get ugly really fast.
Don't get me wrong--A gazillionaire only paying 10-13% in taxes is disgusting enough, but Romney's already weathered (sort of) that storm for 2010 without it causing too much damage to him.
But 10 solid years of paying ZERO (or virtually zero) taxes?? That'd be a crushing blow. He'd still get 35-40% of the brain dead, the racists, and others who literally don't give a shit about anything except beating Obama...but that'd be his ceiling.
But Reid didn't stop there--he decided to make it personal, which is (to me) even more of an eyebrow-raiser:
"His poor father must be so embarrassed about his son," Reid said, in reference to George Romney's standard-setting decision to turn over 12 years of tax returns when he ran for president in the late 1960s.
Holy shit. Again, Reid had better be pretty fucking confident about the zero-tax thing to have the balls to publicly state that Romney's father (who passed away in 1995) would be "embarrassed" about his son. Yikes.
As for the source of the claim, Reid had even more--he claims that Romney is far wealthier than even the $250 million figure that's been batted around:
A month or so ago, he said, a person who had invested with Bain Capital called his office.
"Harry, he didn't pay any taxes for 10 years," Reid recounted the person as saying.
"He didn't pay taxes for 10 years! Now, do I know that that's true? Well, I'm not certain," said Reid. "But obviously he can't release those tax returns. How would it look?
"You guys have said his wealth is $250 million," Reid went on. "Not a chance in the world. It's a lot more than that. I mean, you do pretty well if you don't pay taxes for 10 years when you're making millions and millions of dollars."
Whoa Nellie.
If he's right--or if Romney continues to refuse to release proof that he's wrong--this is MASSIVE.
If he's wrong--or if Romney can doctor up enough BS evidence to make most people think that he's wrong--then this could be a huge blow to not just Obama, but the Dems in general.
It's a hell of a ballsy thing for Reid to do either way.
UPDATE: I'm gonna risk threadjacking my own diary a bit here by strongly urging you to read and, hopefully, also Rec another unrelated diary about the latest development in the continuing saga of Thad "Meltdown" McCotter's MI-11 District:
MI-11: Sh*t Just Got Real; Ron Paul SuperPAC dumps $300K on Bentivolio!