"It would be illegal under federal law (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974) for Occidental, Columbia or Harvard Law School to give any former student’s records to reporters or members of the public without that person’s specific, written permission."
In the law of evidence, there is the idea of balancing the relevance of evidence versus it's unfair prejudicial quality. How relevant are Obama's transcripts from college? Meanwhile, given that the media is composed of the stupidet people graduating college each year, can you imagine the shit storm of unfair prejudice that would result if Obama had taken courses in say critical race theory or African studies? Meanwhile, would any prejudice to the Romney campaign from the information in his tax records be "unfair" prejudice? Or legitimate prejudice?
Is it normal to release educational transcripts? I thought taxes were pretty much a given, but not so with college transcripts.
Also the OPs assertion of paying 1 million dollars to hide Obama's transcripts is so ridiculous on its face I'm surprised people willingly post things like that online.
Fun fact, we have Romney's 2010 and 2011 tax returns. McCain only provided two years of returns too when he was running. It's not a hard-precedent to provide "everything you have", either tax records or birth certificates or transcripts or letters of recommendation... But looking at it from a politician's perspective: if it can only help you, fine, release it. Otherwise why bother? Unless the damage from not releasing exceeds the damage from releasing (which I think is becoming the case for Romney), it's just unnecessary information.
