Kerry Healey's comments come after jabbing at the candidate for his 'binders' comment. Mitt's female LG.: Hours with 'binders'

Mitt Romney’s female ex-lieutenant governor took a swipe on Thursday at criticism of the GOP nominee’s comment during the debate that he had “binders full of women” while he was staffing up as governor of Massachusetts.

“I … think this is so ironic because it’s given us an opportunity to talk about one of the great strengths of Gov. Romney during his time in office, which was that he did want to bring women’s voices into government, that he did have half of the women in his top appointed positions, right there with him,” said Kerry Healey, the former lieutenant governor of Massachusetts who served with Romney.


Her comments came in the wake of an explosion, on Twitter and beyond, of memes and jokes jabbing Romney for his “binders” comment. But Healey, who was interviewed on Fox News’s “America’s Newsroom with Bill Hemmer and Martha MacCallum,” said she didn’t find Romney’s comments eyebrow-raising.

“I was the person he asked to be liaison to the group that had collected those résumés for us,” Healey said. “So I had spent hours poring over the résumés of the women contained in those binders. I knew exactly what he was talking about.”

( Also on POLITICO: Top political memes of the 2012 race)

Healey cited herself, along with Romney’s then-chief of staff, Beth Myers, and his top policy adviser, as prominent females in Romney’s Massachusetts administration, in addition to “all the Cabinet secretaries he brought forward.”

“So the idea that Gov. Romney in some way is not interested in hearing those voices, hearing the concerns of women is simply false on the face of it,” she said.