RomneyGate 2012: The Governor's Secret Hard Drives

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—Remember the erased tapes in the Nixon White House, the infamous 18 ½ minute gap? Here’s the President’s personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, demonstrating the pose she says she held for that length of time, simultaneously talking on the phone and “accidentally” erasing exactly that key smoking-gun section of tape with that foot right there….

Ah, but how technology has changed…smoking guns are located on hard drives now, and exponentially more difficult to erase. One would have to take extraordinary steps to cover one’s tracks….

RomneyGate might be no further away than those hard drives that Romney took with him when he left the Governor's office. All of the electronic information on those drives is public property, the property of The People of the State of Massachusets, yet he took them all….

The Holy Grail of Mitt Romney’s presidential lust just might be grasping that power of Presidential Privilege. Does he plan to take the White House hard drives with him also?

What was so damaging that he had to take the physical drives, even the mail server of his entire staff? The commingling of State and Mormon business? Orders from Salt Lake City? Once a Bishop, always a Bishop, as is said….

Romney has defended taking the hard drives, stating that there was no violation of the law, but has offered no explanation of why they were taken, every staff hard drive and the mail server.

He provided a massive stack of email printouts, sure to overwhelm any who tried to make some sense of it, claiming this was full disclosure or close enough.

Those hard drives had serial numbers, are easily identified. Did they all share the same fate? All completely erased or destroyed? Or selected files, which they would all have in common, although in different physical locations on the drives.

There are surely some great stories here….

And then there is the question of backups. Those files have to exist somewhere. If not, it would take an extraordinarily determined and methodical effort to destroy them all. Why? that's a good question too.

RomneyGate….

Romney's Achilles Heel might be on those drives, and it's not so much about the Money, although there is certain to be a megadump of money, even some wisecracks, enough to make people cringe for years to come, and maybe some tax advice, Wall Street insider moves….

Someone should start tracking down those former Romney staff members with a video camera, see what they have to say. Will they scramble for cover like arsonists, burglars or Mormon pedophiles and polygamists when confronted by an intrepid investigative reporter?

Only Bishop Romney knows for sure....

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Sean Cruz writes at http://www.blogoliticalsean.blogspot.com/

He is the father of four children who disappeared into Utah in a Mormon abduction in 1996, organized by a group of Mormon extremists that his former wife had fallen in with, in retaliation for his criticism of LDS church policy.

In 2005, he led the Oregon Senate workgroup that crafted Oregon’s landmark child abduction statute, Senate Bill 1041, known as “Aaron’s Law”, after his late son Aaron, who died in Payson, Utah as a result of this church-sponsored abduction.

With Aaron’s Law, Oregon became the only state in the nation where child abduction creates a civil cause of action. Without a civil cause of action, a parent of a kidnapped child has no basis in law to hold a kidnapper financially accountable for the damages the criminal causes.

Without a civil cause of action, the parent of a kidnapped child has only two courses of action: the family law system or the criminal system, both of which routinely fail the child and the family in abduction cases.

The U.S. Department of Justice documents more than 200,000 cases each year of parental and family abductions, year after year, and many of those children are never recovered.

Aaron’s Law passed the Oregon House on a unanimous vote, the last stop on its way to the Governor for signature into law, but is still in need of amending and refining in order to be truly effective in both preventing and resolving abductions.

And Aaron’s Law should be modeled in other states, eventually becoming the law of the land, and the sooner the better for that.

Day One of a Mormon abduction, 16 years later....

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—

The 16th anniversary of the day that my four children disappeared, kidnapped into Mormon Country, has arrived and it is just as their Mormon abductors intended it to be, both then and now.

A Mormon shunning, with the weight of the church to keep it in place, intended to punish me for speaking my mind so long ago, intended to last forever….

Mormon officials in three states put the scheme together, had decided to hide my children in the mountains east of Ogden, and to hide themselves behind a phalanx of Mormon lawyers and the theocratic courts that pass for a justice system in Utah. An actual Mormon cabal, think about it….

On this day 16 years ago, a Monday morning, a school day during the Great Storm of 1996, my children had vanished, were in fact being driven by a roundabout, secret route from Battle Ground to Salem to a motel near the Oregon coast where they were hidden for a few days, waiting for flooded Interstate 84 eastbound to clear.

Then they were driven out through the Columbia Gorge, through the Blue Mountains, east across Idaho and then down into theocratic Utah, where a group of Mormon zealots awaited their arrival, covert as you would expect a gang of human traffickers to be, months of planning invested in this, not to mention the overtly criminal conduct.

They were going to take my children to Utah and force them to choose a parent—the Mormon parent—and cut all ties with their non-Mormon family members. This amounts to torture, emotional torture, Mormonboarding….

All of this was in clear violation of an Order for Joint Custody that had been in effect for five years. Decisions about the children’s education were to be made jointly.

From this point on, however, every decision regarding my children was made by others, as I fought through four jurisdictions in three states.

Utah officials ignored or refused to comply with orders from Oregon or Washington courts, even a felony arrest warrant for Custodial Interference I. At the same time, all of the courts involved treated the Joint Custody order as if it were printed in invisible ink.

They have their own ways of doing things in Mormon Country, and if you have been labeled as anti-Mormon, they will shut you out. In this respect, they are like the Borg….

And like the Borg, they ganged up on my children, force-fed them the dogma, forced them to reject the non-Mormon parent in favor of Mormon stepdad #1, then Mormon stepdad #2 (the heavy-set thug who slapped my kids around Payson Utah), and now Mormon stepdad #3.

Mormon stepdad #3 has a heavy investment in maintaining the status quo, simple jealousy a good portion of that. I am the one, after all, who his wife sustained a 15-year prior marriage with, a relationship that produced four beautiful children, and these facts are always going to stick in his craw.

But it’s really about the Mormonism, this whole story.

Apart from the shock of losing their father, their grandmother and all of their father’s family, their Oregon homes, their schools and all of their friends, my children suffered an onslaught of indoctrination, far beyond what is normal even in Mormon circles.

This particular group of Mormons was well aware that they were acting criminally in terms of state and federal statutes, but they were group-thinking their way through the series of crimes, convinced that they were working on behalf of A Higher Authority. And they certainly wanted to be sure that their asses were protected from discovery, which could lead to criminal prosecution.

They forced my children to write letters to the court, begging the court not to make them return to Oregon. My children wrote that they never wanted to leave Utah, not ever, not for any reason, and the Courts did nothing to look any deeper than the surface.

This is how my children were forced into a religious war, where they remain today, still in Mormon Country, where many Mormons are heavily invested in maintaining the status quo. Long past the time when the statutes of limitations bar prosecutions, there is still the fear of discovery, embarrassment and loss of status in that closed-off secretive Mormon society, a very real threat.

How differently our lives would have turned out if only the court had required that the children be returned to their Oregon homes and the terms of the Joint Custody Order enforced. For years, that was all that I asked the Courts to do.

Aaron would still be alive today.

Our family would be whole. Maybe some Mormon, some non-Mormon, but not at war within the family over religious bullshit.

Our family would be whole.

And Aaron would be alive today.

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Sean Cruz writes at

www.blogoliticalsean.blogspot.com