Mitt Romney: My aides followed the law

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said Friday that he followed the law in disposing of his official records when he left the Massachusetts governor's office.

The GOP front-runner addressed the issue for the first time in an exchange with reporters after a campaign event. Romney was responding to a Boston Globe story that said his aides purchased the computer hard drives when he left office in 2007 and the server was wiped clean, making it impossible to retrieve e-mail records from his administration.

Romney said that his aides "all followed the law exactly as it's written."

"We actually put 700 boxes of information into the archives that wasn't even required so we followed the law exactly as intended and as written," he told reporters when questions were raised about the Globe story at a lunch sponsored by the New Hampshire Union Leader.

Meanwhile, Romney has accused President Obama of being "obsessed with secrecy" by not releasing to him any correspondence between the president's top advisers and current Massachusetts Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick. His campaign accused them of colluding on a "dirty tricks shop"' that produced the Globe story.