Report: Romney’s Salt Lake City Olympics lacked transparency

When Mitt Romney left Bain Capital to take control of the Salt Lake City Olympics in 1999, he promised “complete transparency.” But reporters and public officials say they were denied access to certain documents, and archivists allege that many of the Games’ key records were destroyed shortly after the they ended, reports The Boston Globe.  

Romney and the Salt Lake Organizing Committee had no legal obligation to either preserve key records or make them public since the Games were organized by a private, nonprofit corporation that was exempt from public records laws.

But Romney, charged with reinvigorating the Games after a scandal damaged the Committee’s reputation, pledged that the public would have access to “all of the documents inside our organization,” as well as an extensive public archive of documents related to the Games. A decade later, the Games’ official records still have not been made available to the public.

The Romney campaign argues that Romney had resigned from the Salt Lake Organizing Committee in early 2002 to run for governor of Massachusetts and “was not involved in the decision-making regarding the final disposition of records.”