Romney provides devastating response to WaPo hit piece

Jennifer Rubin:

Editors of The Post met this afternoon with members of the Romney campaign to discuss The Post’s coverage of purported outsourcing by Bain Capital companies. As reported elsewhere, The Post refused to retract its story.

The Romney campaign has now gone nuclear, releasing a blow-by-blow rebuttal to The Post’s story. (It can be read in full here.)

Right Turn received a copy of a second document, which the Romney team gave to the editors. This 10-page paper goes through The Post’s article paragraph by paragraph, and it requests documentation for a number of assertions in the article. The first two pages (without footnotes) read as follows:

HEADLINE: Romney’s Bain Capital Invested In Companies That Moved Jobs Overseas

The article details companies that had facilities overseas, but it never provides an example in which American jobs were moved overseas. The headline implies that, while under Bain’s control, the six companies addressed in the article laid off Americans and sent the jobs offshore; but the article itself never provides an example of that occurring. The headline makes a claim that the article never substantiates.

Of note, this article did not quote a single human source. Had the Post contacted individuals affiliated with these companies, as is common in journalism, it would have learned that this is rife with inaccuracies and fails to live up to the Post’s investigative legacy. [Romney for President] has confirmed the analysis below with company officials.

2.Mitt Romney’s financial company, Bain Capital, invested in a series of firms that specialized in relocating jobs done by American workers to new facilities in low-wage countries like China and India.

No firms identified in this article relocated jobs done by American workers to any international locations during the period of time where (a) Romney was at Bain Capital (1984 – Feb. 1999) and (b) Bain Capital owned interests in the companies (hereinafter, the “Romney Era”).

This article addresses China when discussing Bain’s investments in GT Bicycles, Modus, and ChipPac. As established below, no American jobs were relocated to China during the Romney Era by any of these companies. (See Section 9 for GT Bicycles, Section 8 for Modus, and Section 11 for ChipPac).

This article does not even attempt to address India.

Unsurprisingly, the President has used this inaccurate lede for political gain. Minutes after your story posted online, David Axelrod wrote: “Tonight’s story in the Washington Post exposed Mitt Romney’s breathtaking hypocrisy. He has campaigned all over this country, vowing that he would be an advocate for American jobs. But tonight we learned that he made a fortune advising companies on how to outsource jobs to China and India.” The Post’s inaccurate reporting has consequences.

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There is much more and it is worth reading in full.

What Romney's campaign needs to do is find a way not only to get this long rebuttal out, but find a way to attacks Obama's embrace of the false narrative.  They need to do so in two ways.  One is to point out the material is false and the other is to point out how Obama's policies have outsourced jobs to hostile countries in the energy business and to competitors of the domestic energy business.  The President's remarks on Barzil's offshore wells would be a good starting point.