Did Young Mitt Romney Impersonate A Police Officer? Another Witness Says Yes..

When Mitt Romney was a college freshman, he told fellow residents of
his Stanford University dormitory that he sometimes disguised himself as
a police officer – a crime in many states, including Michigan and
California, where he then lived. And he had the uniform on display as
proof.

So recalls Robin Madden, who had also just arrived as a freshman, the
startling incident began when Romney called him and two or three other
residents into his room, saying, “Come up, I want to show you
something.” When they entered Romney’s room, “and laid out on his bed
was a Michigan State Trooper’s uniform.”

Madden, a native Texan who graduated from Stanford in 1970 and went on to become a successful television producer and writer,
has never forgotten that strange moment, which he has recounted to
friends over the years as he observed his former classmate’s political
ascent. The National Memo learned of the incident from a longtime Madden friend to whom he had mentioned it years ago.

Said Madden in a recent interview, “He told us that he had gotten the
uniform from his father,” George Romney, then the Governor of Michigan,
whose security detail was staffed by uniformed troopers. “He told us
that he was using it to pull over drivers on the road. He also had a red
flashing light that he would attach to the top of his white Rambler.”

In Madden’s recollection, confirmed by his wife Susan, who also
attended Stanford during those years, “we thought it was all pretty
weird. We all thought, ‘Wow, that’s pretty creepy.’ And after that, we
didn’t have much interaction with him,” although both Madden and Romney
were prep school boys living in the same dorm, called Rinconada.

Other eyewitnesses have previously recalled Romney’s alleged use of a
police or trooper uniform in pranks during his high school years at the
exclusive Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

Phillip Maxwell, a prep school buddy, told the New Republic
in 2008 that Romney had pulled over students from a girls school next
door to Cranbrook while wearing a police uniform as a prank. Other
former classmates described Mitt as a “happy-go-lucky guy known less for
his achievements and more for his pranks.”

In The Real Romney, a biography published by Boston Globe reporters Michael Kranish and Scott Helman this year, another former friend recalled
how Romney had “put a siren on top of his car and chased two of his
friends who were driving around with their dates.” The two friends were
in on the scheme, but the girls were not. There was beer in the car
trunk, according to a prearranged plan. Mitt told his two counterparts
to get out of their vehicle and into his car. Then they drove off,
leaving the girls behind.

“It was a terrible thing to do,” said one of his accomplices, a Cranbrook classmate named Graham McDonald.

To some observers, Romney’s alleged masquerading as a cop to
intimidate innocent drivers shows a character defect that is also
revealed by other bullying incidents
during his youth. When those incidents were disclosed in the Washington
Post earlier this year, Romney issued an apology of sorts, stating that
he had done “stupid” things and was sorry if he had harmed anyone.

While he may have believed that his cop antics were harmless, Romney
may well have been breaking the law merely by donning a police uniform,
committing a crime if he pretended to be a cop and a felony if he did so
more than once. In both California and Michigan, any person convicted of fraudulently impersonating a police officer may be sentenced to up to one year in prison. (The National Memo has collected some other examples of police impersonators.)

The Romney campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Following his sophomore year at Stanford, young Mitt left and never
went back. For more than two years he served as a Mormon missionary in
France — thus avoiding the obligation to wear a very different uniform in Vietnam.