As promised, here’s the full version of the video secretly recorded at a private Mitt Romney fundraiser earlier this year (via Mother Jones, which had been rolling out snippets of the footage since late yesterday afternoon).
Update 11:15 p.m: An earlier version of the first clip cut off roughly 18 minutes at the front end of Romney’s remarks, a result of what the magazine says was a production error that occurred while uploading the clip. MoJo published the longer version Tuesday evening, and we’ve updated our post below with the new clip.
The new version opens with some small talk from Romney as he warms up the crowd and includes his joke about how he would have a better shot of winning the election if his father had been born to Mexican parents as opposed to Americans living in Mexico (a clip that had been previously excerpted during the magazine’s initial roll out of the footage).
As to the gap between the end of “part one” and the beginning of “part two,” MoJo’s David Corn explains that, according to his source, the recording device was inadvertently turned off during the dinner but that it was quickly turned back on. In all, Corn says that his source estimates that there was only about a “one-to-two minute loss of tape.”
There will no doubt be some people who point to those missing minutes as proof of some kind of editorial sleight of hand (that’s right, we read our comment section). But given that Romney has twice stood by his remarks—once Monday night after the original clip was published, and a second time Tuesday afternoon after the slightly-less-than-full version was posted—it’s hard to imagine what he could have possibly said while the camera was off that would have dampened the blow back he has faced in the wake of the video’s release, or significantly changed the substance of his remarks or the debate that has resulted from them.
