Mitt Romney and His Tax-Evading Campaign Staffer

Ah, politics. Almost every candidate ends up with a few ethically-questionable bucks in the campaign coffers. Barack Obama had Tony Rezko. Hillary Clinton had Norman Hsu.

Now Mitt Romney has James Sims. But unlike Clinton and Obama’s shady donors, Sims once held a prominent position for the Romney campaign.

WBZ found that the Boston businessman and “Romney for President national finance co-chair” has a nasty habit of evading his taxes.

Until the I-Team called him, Sims owed more than $500,000 in back taxes in two states:

* $263,000 on his Boston mansion, dating back three years.
* $266,000 in back taxes on his California estate near Pebble Beach, dating back four years.

In that time, Sims and his wife donated $300,000 to the Romney campaign. For his part, Romney doesn’t condone the bad behavior.

“As you know,” he said, “you get a lot of supporters and a lot of helpers, and not everything they say, and not everything they have done in their life, do you subscribe to.”

Uh…yeah. Except this guy wasn’t just a supporter, he was the national finance co-chair. This is exactly why we’re going to miss Romney once he finally bows out of the presidential race. One of his main men gets nabbed for gross tax evasion, and he just shrugs it off with a quick bit of evasive language.

What’s that you say? National finance co-chair? Pish-posh. He was basically an intern.

Almost makes you long for the days when Romney’s shamelessness was restricted to insulting voters.