(Photo: Bain Capital/Boston Globe)

Mormon golem Mitt Romney has to own up to being the Governor of Communist Taxachusetts, because too many people saw him in the state during the brief time that he was there and, rich as he is, even he doesn’t have enough money to whack everyone in the commonwealth. So he did the next best thing: flushing all the information down the “memory hole” and getting the state to pay for it:

Mitt Romney spent nearly $100,000 in state funds to replace computers in his office at the end of his term as governor of Massachusetts in 2007 as part of an unprecedented effort to keep his records secret, Reuters has learned.

The move during the final weeks of Romney’s administration was legal but unusual for a departing governor, Massachusetts officials say.

The effort to purge the records was made a few months before Romney launched an unsuccessful campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. He is again competing for the party’s nomination, this time to challenge Barack Obama for the presidency in 2012.

[...]

When Romney left the governorship of Massachusetts, 11 of his aides bought the hard drives of their state-issued computers to keep for themselves. Also before he left office, the governor’s staff had emails and other electronic communications by Romney’s administration wiped from state servers, state officials say.

Those actions erased much of the internal documentation of Romney’s four-year tenure as governor, which ended in January 2007. Precisely what information was erased is unclear.

It’s perfectly understandable that his former aides would want to keep their old hard drives since back in 2007 high capacity flash drives weren’t too common and all of the IT men-about-town in those days were hitting the nightspots packing hard drives because they made the babes hotter than an overclocked motherboard chipset with inadequate airflow, if you know what I mean and I think you do, you sexy beast. However, if I were an enterprising journalist, I would be tracking down those former aides to see if they still have those hard drives (which make lovely coasters and paperweights, I hear) or if the hard drives have mysteriously disappeared; say, right about the same time a large deposit magically appeared in some bank accounts and those aides started flashing some serious gift-cardage at Legal Sea Foods.

Go for the cover-up, stay for the scrod…