BOSTON - Today, Jim Barnett, campaign manager for Scott Brown, sent the following letter to Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren calling on her to make available her tax returns for the tax years 2006 through 2011 to fulfill a request made by the media. Brown has agreed to make these six years of returns public on Friday, April 27, 2012.
The letter to Professor Warren is below and is available here:
Dear Professor Warren:
Scott Brown is making available for inspection six years of tax returns on Friday, covering the tax years 2006 to 2011, as requested by the media. You have declined this request. Instead, you have offered to release far more limited information, and even then have made that contingent on a demand that Senator Brown go first.
The people of Massachusetts deserve better from their candidates for Senate than the type of political gamesmanship you are engaging in.
The tax years you are attempting to conceal contain important and potentially revealing information, including income you received for outside legal work, such as when you assisted Travelers Insurance in a case against victims of asbestos poisoning. For that, you were paid at least $212,000, according to your personal financial disclosures. Your tax returns dating back to 2006 would provide a more complete picture of how much you were paid by Travelers, and what other types of outside legal work you performed and on whose behalf. Additionally, given your critique of rising tuition costs, your tax returns may better inform the public as to how university faculty compensation packages contribute to high tuition rates.
You claim to be an advocate for openness and transparency in government. However, when you were chairing the Congressional Oversight Panel, you were criticized for not practicing the same level of transparency you demanded of others. Now, as a candidate for U.S. Senate, you have an opportunity to demonstrate that your rhetoric on transparency is more than sanctimony.
