The Mitt Romney campaign met with editors of the Washington Post today in an attempt to get the paper to retract a story about how the private equity firm Bain Capital helped outsource jobs when Romney was its CEO. Initially, the campaign merely admonished the Post for not distinguishing between “outsourcing” and “offshoring,” but today it brought a set of slides in an attempt to refute the entire premise of the story.

However, the evidence that the campaign provided does not contradict the paper’s reporting, which was gleaned from documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Instead, the campaign’s document simply includes assertions from executives of the companies in which Bain invested, claiming that they did not outsource jobs.

Left unsaid is that these executives have a vested interest in not being seen as offshoring jobs. “None of these 6 companies sent jobs overseas under Bain Capital during Mitt Romney’s tenure, in fact they added jobs,” the campaign’s document claims, providing no sources of evidence. Here are some of the slides:

The Post is standing by its story.

The Washington Post reported today that Bain Capital, the private equity firm Mitt Romney headed for 15 years, invested extensively in companies that moved jobs overseas to low-wage countries like China. The practice contradicts the rhetoric of candidate Romney, who since announcing his presidential ambitions, has criticized government policies that have led to jobs, particularly those in manufacturing, moving offshore.

Rather than dispute the substance of the article, the Romney campaign has responded to the Post piece by parsing words, claiming that the story is “fundamentally flawed” for not differentiating between the technical definitions of “outsourcing” and “offshoring”:

“This is a fundamentally flawed story that does not differentiate between domestic outsourcing versus offshoring nor versus work done overseas to support U.S. exports. Mitt Romney spent 25 years in the real world economy so he understands why jobs come and they go,” Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said. “As president, he will implement policies that make it easier and more attractive for companies to create jobs here at home. President Obama’s attacks on profit and job creators make it less attractive to create jobs in the U.S.”

Technically, the campaign is correct. The official definition of outsourcing is pushing activities outside of the company that could have been performed in-house. A company can outsource, while keeping the activity domestic. Offshoring is the practice of sending jobs overseas.

However, outsourcing is commonly used to describe the practice of moving jobs to foreign countries. But just to be clear, ThinkProgress has changed the text of the Post article so that the proper technical terms are used:

While Bain was not the largest player in the outsourcing offshoring field, the private equity firm was involved early on, at a time when the departure of jobs from the United States was beginning to accelerate and new companies were emerging as handmaidens to this outflow of employment.

Bain played several roles in helping these outsourcing offshoring companies, such as investing venture capital so they could grow and providing management and strategic business advice as they navigated this rapidly developing field. [...]

According to a news release issued by Modus Media in 1997, its expansion of outsourcing offshoring services took place in close consultation with Bain. Terry Leahy, Modus’s chairman and chief executive, was quoted in the release as saying he would be “working closely with Bain on strategic expansion.” At the time, three Bain directors sat on the corporate board of Modus.

This simply doesn’t change the fact that Bain, under Romney, invested in companies whose sole purpose was to move jobs to other countries, directly countering the narrative that Romney has been trying to set.

During a February speech in Toledo, Ohio, Mitt Romney blasted China for taking American jobs. “They’ve been able to put American businesses out of business and kill American jobs,” Romney said. And that was certainly not the only time that Romney lamented that jobs, specifically in manufacturing, have been moving to China.

“Thirty years ago, America was overwhelmingly the largest manufacturing economy in the world,” he said during a speech in Nevada last year. “This year, China is slated to pass us.” Romney’s jobs plan is also heavy on anti-China rhetoric.

But as the Washington Post reported, Bain Capital, the private equity firm that Romney headed, played its own part in sending jobs to low-wage countries, including China. In fact, Bain “invested in a series of firms that specialized in relocating jobs done by American workers to new facilities in low-wage countries like China and India.”

In one example, Bain was the largest shareholder in a company called Modus Media, which “specialized in helping companies outsource their manufacturing“:

Modus Media told the SEC it was performing outsource packaging and hardware assembly for IBM, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Computer Corp. The filing disclosed that Modus had operations on four continents, including Asian facilities in Singapore, Taiwan, China and South Korea, and European facilities in Ireland and France, and a center in Australia. [...]

According to a news release issued by Modus Media in 1997, its expansion of outsourcing services took place in close consultation with Bain. Terry Leahy, Modus’s chairman and chief executive, was quoted in the release as saying he would be “working closely with Bain on strategic expansion.”.

Other companies that Bain invested in sent jobs all over the world, including to Ireland and Mexico, while Romney has tried to claim that Bain was all about creating jobs and turning around American companies that otherwise would have gone under.

As one of Romney’s former partners put it,”I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation…The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for your investors.” And that’s what Bain did, even if it meant helping companies move operations to the same country Romney now blasts for stealing American jobs.