the Obama people keep on wanting more and more and more. More things to pick through, more things for their opposition research to try make a mountain out of and to distort and to be dishonest about. We’re going to put out two years of tax returns.

In addition to his 2003 returns, Kerry also released federal tax returns from the years 1999 to 2002 yesterday. There has been some dispute about returns for those years. Kerry has claimed that he had already released the returns — in January of this year, he said, “I released all my tax returns for 20 years. I have never not released my tax returns throughout my political career.”

“Months ago, the Romney team began making this false and convoluted excuse — the media investigated it and promptly reminded them that as a presidential candidate John Kerry had released twenty years of tax returns,” Seth said in a statement to TPM. “Still, months later they’re falling back on this same disproven excuse. In fact, if the Romney standard was the same as the Kerry standard for disclosure, the media would have the chance to review twenty years of Romney tax returns. Ed Gillespie should know better.”

The bigger problem is that Gillespie’s full comment draws further attention to an enormous gray area that Romney is pretending doesn’t exist. For a decade, the official Romney line, which he repeated in a CBS interview Friday night, has been that “I had no role whatsoever in the management of Bain Capital after February of 1999.” But here’s what Gillespie said on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday:

“You know there may have been a thought at the time that it could be part time. It was not part time. The Olympics was in a shambles. He took a leave of absence and in fact, Candy, ended up not going back at all and retired retroactively to February 1999 as a result.”

Gillespie is basically acknowledging that for some of the time between February 1999, when Romney stepped away from his day-to-day role at Bain to head up the Salt Lake Organizing Committee, and the 2002 date when he actually reached a severance agreement with Bain, Romney attempted to keep a hand in Bain’s activities. As you can tell, Gillespie is doing his best to make it sound like Romney’s part-time Bain engagement was barely a blip on that timeline, but all sorts of information has come to light that suggests it was more than that:

In Romney's Reality it doesn't matter what he personally believes, because he is selling a product, and as CEO of Romney For President, he has to craft the product to meet the market demand.

His father, George Romney, set the precedent that people running for president would file their tax returns, let everybody look at them. But Mitt Romney can’t do that because he’s basically paid no taxes in the prior 12 years.

The most mysterious of the unexplained mysteries about Mitt Romney’s considerable wealth is how he was able to amass between $21 million and $102 million in his individual retirement account during the 15 years he was at Bain Capital LLC. (snip)

On July 3, Current TV host Jennifer Granholm, a former Democratic governor of Michigan, invited Edward Kleinbard, a law professor at the University of Southern California, on her show to discuss how Romney could have accomplished this remarkable feat. There were “only two possibilities,” Kleinbard told Granholm. Either “from a little acorn, a mighty oak grew very, very quickly, extraordinarily so,” Kleinbard explained, causing Granholm to interject, “What little acorn could grow to be $101 million? I want to get some of that acorn!”

The other possibility, Kleinbard suggested, was not dissimilar to what Maremont theorized: that Romney contributed limited-partnership interests in Bain’s buyouts to his IRA. What was “quite troubling” to Kleinbard is that he suspected Romney may have contributed these interests to his IRA at a fraction of their market value -- “pennies on the dollar” -- and well below what he might have charged you or me. When the buyouts became successful, Kleinbard proposed, the pennies on the dollar were suddenly worth real dollars.

“What’s very frustrating to me about all this is that we can only talk in abstractions and generalities because, again, of the lack of disclosure,”