How Jimmy Carter's grandson helped derail Mitt Romney's presidential campaign

There's a compelling argument to be made that Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign was done in by the infamous "47 percent" video. In the secretly recorded video from a fundraiser, Romney claimed that nearly half of Americans are "freeloaders" who pay no taxes and feel "entitled" to government benefits.

There’s a surprising connection between that video and the late former President Jimmy Carter, who passed away on Sunday.

The damning video was first published in September 2012 by David Corn of Mother Jones Magazine. James Carter IV, the grandson of former President Carter, is given a research assistant credit in the story. But, it was Carter who helped facilitate the leak of the video, making the scoop possible.

James Carter IV, who was working as an independent Democratic opposition researcher to "push back against Romney's relentless campaign-trail mockery of his grandfather", says he stumbled across parts of the video online in August 2012.

Carter told Daily Intel that he first noticed a portion of the video in which Romney discusses using Chinese labor while working at Bain Capital. That clip, uploaded by a YouTube user named “RomneyExposed” in late May, and then again in late August by an account called “Rachel Maddow” that has since been deleted, eventually made it to Buzzfeed and Daily Kos.*

Additional pieces of the tape were then added to a YouTube account called “Anne Onymous” starting three weeks ago. “There was a minor uproar about it on Twitter when I found [the first clip], so I kept doing research on it and that eventually led me to be able to narrow down who it originated from,” said Carter. Via Twitter, he contacted the person who claimed to have secretly taped and uploaded the video, and then sought to help publicize the remarks. “That seemed to be the purpose of [the filming] — to get it to a larger audience,” Carter said.

Carter eventually tracked down the person behind the video and negotiated its release.

The video was a lethal blow to Romney's campaign, from which it never fully recovered. At first, Romney defended his remarks, saying they were "inelegantly stated." A month later, he disavowed his comments and said they were "completely wrong."

Romney eventually lost the 2012 election to Democrat Barack Obama. In 2013, Obama reportedly personally thanked Carter for his role in unearthing the video.

McKay Coppins' biography of Romney published earlier this year revealed that after the video was published, Romney sank into a deep depression and aides worried he might drop out of the race.