Mitt Romney gave $10,000 to the National Organization for Marriage in 2008.<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mittromney/7027734697/sizes/z/in/photostream/">Mitt Romney</a>/Flickr
We’ve known that Mitt Romney helped bankroll California’s anti-gay-marriage campaign in 2008. But on Friday, Huffington Post‘s Sam Stein presented new details—specifically that Romney’s $10,000 donation (did he lose a bet?) to National Organization for Marriage, the nation’s leading stop-gay-marriage outfit, came via his network of state PACs that we reported on last July:
Records filed by Romney’s Free and Strong America PAC with the Federal Election Commission did not include details of that $10,000 donation. Nor did NOM’s public 990 form. In fact, record of the payment was only uncovered Friday when the pro-gay rights Human Rights Campaign was sent a private IRS filing from NOM via a whistleblower. The Human Rights Campaign shared the filing with The Huffington Post.
Asked for comment, an aide to Romney said that the donation was made through the Alabama chapter of the Free and Strong America PAC. State records confirm this. However, the 990 NOM filed lists the donation as having come from PO Box 79226 in Belmont, Massachusetts.
Belmont, of course, is where Romney maintains his nominal address, in the basement of his son’s house.
The NOM donation is particularly dicey given another recent development. On Tuesday, Buzzfeed reported on an internal NOM document detailing the group’s aim to “drive a wedge between gays and blacks” in order to knock down gay marriage efforts. Those documents date back to 2008. Put another way, Romney donated $10,000 to an effort geared at “fanning the hostility” between gays and black voters.
Here’s the full document, via HRC:
