Mitt Romney just gets into more and more trouble with his shifting stories around his departure time at Bain Capital. We have more evidence now that he committed some manner of felony when he told the FEC that he had “not had any active role with any Bain Capital entity and has not been involved in the operations of any Bain Capital entity in any way” after 1999, when he reportedly left. But more information keeps cropping up that he did have dealings with Bain entities. He testified in 2002 that he spent a lot of time in board meetings in Massachusetts in Bain-affiliated companies. And there are more revelations. First from the New York Observer:

In 2002, when he was running for Governor of Massachusetts, Mr. Romney and his aides, including Eric Fehrnstrom who remains his senior advisor, spoke to the Boston Globe for a story after questions were raised about two businesses that taken over by Bain Capital and hit with layoffs while he worked with the company. That article refers multiple times to the fact that Mr. Romney “was CEO of Bain Capital until 2001,” an assertion that apparently went unquestioned by Mr. Romney and his staff who defended him by saying he was on leave when the incidents occurred.

“Romney, who was CEO of Bain Capital until 2001, has repeatedly said he was on leave from the company in 1994, when strikes erupted at Ampad’s now- closed Indiana paper plant, and again in 2001, when GST Steel, a Kansas City plant, laid off workers and closed,” wrote Globe reporter Yvonne Abraham [...]

Prior to taking leave to run the Olympics in 1999, Mr. Romney took a leave of absence from Bain Capital during his 1994 Senate campaign. Another Globe article published in 2002 contains a quote from a former Bain Capital executive named Marc B. Wolpow who said Mr. Romney remained in a very active role at Bain Capital while he was supposedly on a leave of absence for his Senate race.

“I reported directly to Mitt Romney . . . You can’t be CEO of Bain Capital and say, `I really don’t know what my guys were doing,’” Mr. Wolpow said of Mr. Romney role at the company during his leave.

But that’s more circumstantial. It will be harder to explain away Romney’s signature on Bain-related documents with the SEC, on six separate occasions, during that 1999-2001 interregnum.

Between 1999 and 2001, Mitt Romney, then the CEO of Bain Capital, signed at least six documents that the private equity firm filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The documents run in direct contradiction to a claim that Romney has made repeatedly: that he had nothing to do with Bain, and therefore no responsibility for Bain investments, during that period [...]

SEC files include at least six instances of Romney signing documents after February 1999, proving — unless the signatures were forged — that his claim to not have “been involved in the operations of any Bain Capital entity in any way” is wrong.

This is becoming a disaster for Romney, as the campaign becomes about everything he doesn’t want to talk about. The only saving grace is that these questions are peaking early, in July, while most voters aren’t tuned into the race.

But Romney will give a spate of network interviews today, showing that his campaign views this as a serious problem requiring damage control.