Harry Reid: Mitt Romney lost all my respect. Romney: You lost my respect first.
"Good riddance, Mr. Reid. The Senate will be better served without you in it.”
Mitt Romney and Harry Reid still are not getting along.
Following Romney’s unsuccessful bid to be Donald Trump’s secretary of state, Reid, a Nevada Democrat and outgoing Senate minority leader, said that he lost all respect for the former Massachusetts governor.
“Mitt Romney is somebody I had respect for,” Reid told the Huffington Post. “I have none anymore.”
The interview was published Tuesday afternoon, shortly after Trump announced he had picked ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson to be secretary of state. And Reid’s criticism of Romney went deeper.
Reid argued that Romney, who’d called Trump a fraud during the presidential campaign, had lost any ability to criticize the soon-to-be-president by prostrating himself for the secretary of state gig.
“This is man who came out big-time against Trump. Oh, the things he said about Trump. Well, that’s great, that’s wonderful,” Reid said. “Either he wasn’t telling the truth, or he’s a person with no character. After having said that, to go and do homage to this guy he said awful things about, I don’t think that shows much character.”
In a statement to the Post, Romney admitted that though he was critical of Trump during the campaign, he could not pass up any opportunity to “have helped shape foreign policy to protect the country I love.”
Also, Romney dismissed Reid’s criticism, noting that he lost his respect for the Nevadan years ago.
“As for Mr. Reid, I lost respect for him when he repeatedly lied about my taxes and later admitted to it cheerily,” he said. “Good riddance, Mr. Reid. The Senate will be better served without you in it.”
In 2012, Reid repeatedly and baselessly claimed that Romney, then the Republican presidential nominee, didn’t pay taxes for 10 years. As Romney noted in the statement above, Reid refused to apologize for the lie when confronted about it last year.
“Romney didn’t win, did he?” he told CNN’s Dana Bash, when asked if he regretted promoting the falsehood. Reid later called it “one of the best things I’ve ever done.”
To be fair, Romney used a similar tactic earlier this year, in an attempt to induce then-candidate Trump into releasing his tax returns.
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