Romney: 'The blind trust is an age-old ruse'

That’s the way Mitt Romney, back in 1994, described putting one’s assets in a so-called blind trust. But it’s 2012, and the ruse looks pretty serviceable.

By Todd S. Purdum, Vanity Fair

Never mind that Mitt Romney has an estimated net worth as high as $250 million, or that some of it has been invested in offshore accounts of a sort never held by any previous presidential contender. He assures us that his assets are held in a “blind trust” over which he exerts no control.

But just how blind are such trusts, anyway? In Romney’s case, apparently not quite blinkered enough to keep his trustee—who is also his personal lawyer and longtime friend Bradford Malt—from investing more than $10 million of Romney’s money in an investment fund managed by Romney’s son Tagg.

In 1994, when he was running for the Senate against Ted Kennedy, Romney attacked Kennedy for disclaiming any responsibility for his investments, declaring at one point: “The blind trust is an age-old ruse.” He takes a different tack today, but even his own spokeswoman, Andrea Saul, has acknowledged that if he’s elected, he’ll move his wealth into a new, stricter blind trust, governed by federal rules.

Obama set up a blind trust but later decided that even such an arrangement could not protect him from the appearance of a conflict.

It’s generally acknowledged that the first American elected official to use a blind trust was President Lyndon Johnson, who set one up when he assumed the presidency so that he and his wife, Lady Bird, could hold onto their Texas television station—KTBC, in Austin—and yet not be subject to the inevitable conflicts of interest that would result from holding an asset so heavily regulated by the federal government.

(More here.)