American Bridge

 During his presidential campaign in 2007, Republican candidate Mitt Romney promised that a trust overseeing his financial portfolio would shed any investments that conflicted with GOP positions toward Iran, China, stem cell research and other issues. But Romney’s family trusts kept some of those stocks and repeatedly bought new investments in similar holdings as recently as 2010, when they were sold in advance of his latest White House campaign, a detailed review of Romney’s financial records by The Associated Press shows.

Recently disclosed 2010 tax returns for three family trust funds for Romney, his wife, Ann, and their adult children show scores of trades in such investments, worth more than $3 million when the holdings were all sold in 2010.

In 2007, as Romney prepared his first run for president, Malt sold stock in dozens of potentially controversial companies, including casino operators, tobacco growers, and firms with ties to Iran. Last year, after Romney pushed for tougher trade sanctions against China, Malt dumped a number of Chinese holdings. He recently shed a money market mutual fund that had invested in government-backed mortgage companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are blamed for exacerbating the housing bust.

Mitt Romney’s financial advisers shed all his investments in China, worth as much as $1.5 million, at some point after mid-August, about the time that Mr. Romney made “confronting China” on trade a central plank of his economic platform as a Republican presidential candidate.

“After the Senate approved Sen. Sherrod Brown’s bill aimed at punishing China for its export policy to the United States, a reporter asked Brown’s likely opponent, Republican Josh Mandel, how he would have voted on the bill.

A Mandel spokesman answered this way: “Try as he might, it’s too late for Sherrod Brown to hide from his record of outsourcing Ohio jobs to countries like China. During Sherrod Brown’s past decade as a D.C. politician, one out of every four jobs that has left America left from Ohio.”

There was a bit more, but you get the idea. Nowhere did the spokesman provide the slightest clue as to where Mandel stood on an issue that has a lot of traction in Ohio…”