There’s a new tidbit of information surrounding Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” video: there’s a short gap between the first and second parts.
Mother Jones published Romney’s remarks in two parts yesterday, which is how journalist David Corn says he received it from his source.
“When we put up the full video, the source said — and I have no reason not to believe him — that the device that was being used inadvertently shut down or timed-out,” Corn told POLITICO. “As soon as he knew that, he turned the camera back on and, at most, one to two minutes were missed. The video came to me as two separate files, and that is how we posted it on the website.”
So it’s not as if Mother Jones removed some of the footage; it’s just that the original source missed a minute or two.
The right seems really excited about this detail this morning — I’ll look forward to the Rose Mary Woods comparisons, if they’re not already out there — but I’m not entirely sure how this is supposed to help the Republican cause.
To be sure, I should concede that there is a chance that Romney, during this brief unrecorded portion, told the donors, “All that stuff I just said? I mean the opposite. And all the stuff I’m about to say? Yeah, I believe the opposite about that, too.” But since that seems rather unlikely, it’s hard to imagine why this should be considered a mitigating detail.
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