The Republican National Committee released a new Web ad Tuesday slamming President Obama for saying at a White House press conference on Monday that "nobody accused Mr. Romney of being a felon."
The ad features footage of the president answering a question from Nancy Cordes of CBS News.
"Are you comfortable with the tone being set with your campaign? Have you asked them to change their tone when it comes to defining Mr. Romney?" Cordes asks.
The president defends the tenor struck by his campaign.
"Well, first of all, I am not sure that all of those characterizations that you laid out there were accurate. For example, nobody accused Mr. Romney of being a felon," Obama says.
The ad then cuts to audio of deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter on a conference call with reporters in July.
“Either Mitt Romney, through his own words and his own signature, was misrepresenting his position at Bain to the SEC, which is a felony," Cutter says.
Onscreen text then blasts the president over the apparent discrepancy.
"President Obama: Willing to ignore the truth in order to hold on to power," the ad reads.
Democrats point out that the ad truncates the second clause of Cutter's sentence, in which she says either Romney committed a crime by lying to the SEC "or he was misrepresenting his position at Bain to the American people to avoid responsibility for some of the consequences of his investments."
The president's campaign has suggested that they never actually believed — or seriously suggested — Romney committed a felony, but rather that he was trying to avoid association with the firm that he continued to own and which listed him as an executive after his departure to run the Salt Lake City Olympics.
But the Romney campaign said that semantic two-step didn't fly.
“After spending weeks refusing to denounce his super-PAC’s scurrilous ad against Mitt Romney, President Obama once again failed to lead. Worse yet, the president falsely alleged no one in his campaign had accused Mitt Romney of committing a crime,” said Ryan Williams, a Romney campaign spokesman, in a statement Monday. “President Obama’s failure to stand up to dishonest rhetoric and attacks demonstrates yet again he’s diminished the office that he holds and his record is nothing more than business as usual in Washington.”
