Romney at Langone, Murdoch, Blankfein meeting: I won't be 'flip-flopper' on immigration

Mitt Romney last week told a private group of potential supporters and business and media elites, including Rupert Murdoch, that he was treading carefully around the issue of immigration to avoid looking like a "flip-flopper."

The moment, the subject of the media mogul's now famous tweet, took place at a private fundraiser/meet-and-greet put together and hosted by Ken Langone at the Union League Club in Manhattan late Thursday afternoon, several hours after the Supreme Court decision on health care came down, multiple sources told POLITICO.

The event was attended by between 40 and 50 people, sources said, including some major names in fundraising, finance and media. They included Murdoch and his top adviser Joel Klein, Randy Falco, the CEO of Univision, Goldman Sachs head Lloyd Blankfein, real estate scion Bill Rudin, hedge fund executives Stanley Druckenmiller and Julian Robertson, Jets owner Woody Johnson, former Rudy Giuliani adviser Anthony Carbonetti, and pollster and strategist Kellyanne Conway, according to sources familiar with the list of attendees.

Romney was there with a small coterie of his own, including top adviser Russ Schriefer, the sources said. And it was there that Murdoch raised the issue of immigration with him, the sources said.

Conway, reached on her cell phone, refused comment, saying it was a private meeting. Calls and emails to other attendees, including Langone, were not immediately returned. The Romney campaign didn't respond to an email for comment, and a News Corp. spokesman declined comment on behalf of Klein and Murdoch.

At the event, the questioning ran for a long while, the sources said, including asks of the candidate about the health care ruling and the economy. Some expressed some concern about the negative ads run against Romney and a lack of a response — he replied that they don't see the responses from his team or Republians because those don't run in New York, and the attacks always get more media attention.

But one of the most notable exchanges was on immigration, when Falco began by telling Romney how frequently President Obama has been on Univision in comparison to the Republican candidate, adding that he thinks it's important for the GOP hopeful to address what the president did on immigration a few weeks ago with his executive action move to halt some deportations.

Murdoch chimed in, three sources said, telling the candidate on the issue of immigration generally, "You have to take the fight to Obama on this." Romney said the Hispanic vote is important, noting he has Sen. Marco Rubio on the trail for him and that one of his own sons speaks Spanish, but indicated he is not going to change positions from some of what he said in the primaries.

"I know I took some positions in the primary that are" hard to contend with in a general, Romney said, according to two sources.

"I am not going to be a flip-flopper," he added, according to one guest. He talked more about the various concerns that he has to balance in terms of competing constituencies who have different views — and noted, two sources said, the precise percentage that Hispanic voters make up in the swing states, a figure that was less than 20 percent.

It's unclear if he met with Murdoch privately in addition to the fundraiser. But immigration is a signature Murdoch issue.

At one point, the sources said, Romney conceded that Obama had made a smart political maneuver with the executive action he took on immigration, but also said that it wasn't his own thought — that it was something that congressional Republicans have been working on for months. * This post has been updated

Maggie Haberman is senior political reporter for Politico.