“CNN ran an entire piece recently in which they pointed out that, on every single substantive count in the ethics investigation, every single one, that I was vindicated…” – Newt Gingrich on ABC, Jan. 29, 2012
Gingrich has repeatedly said on the campaign trail that during his tenure in Congress he faced 84 politically-motivated ethics charges and that 83 of them were determined to be without merit and thrown out.
Again, the former speaker’s comments involve an apples-and-oranges comparison.
While it is true that Gingrich was frequently accused of wrongdoing by his Democratic rivals in Congress and that many of those charges were dismissed, the Ethics Committee reprimand was based on three charges approved by a bipartisan committee and later authorized by the full Republican-controlled House.
What Gingrich’s campaign statements do not acknowledge is that the Ethics Committee reprimand was based on three separate areas of wrongful conduct, not just one.
How three became one
In December 1996, after its year-long investigation, the subcommittee was poised to bring three charges against Gingrich to the full committee:
- One involved Gingrich’s failure to seek legal advice concerning the alleged use of the tax-exempt Abraham Lincoln Opportunity Foundation to support political activities in concert with Gingrich’s candidate-training program, GOPAC.
- A second involved Gingrich’s failure to seek legal advice concerning the alleged use of the tax-exempt Progress and Freedom Foundation to support political activities in concert with GOPAC .
- The third involved the alleged provision of two letters to the investigative subcommittee that were found to be inaccurate, incomplete, and unreliable.
That same month, Gingrich and the committee began negotiating the deal in which Gingrich would agree to accept a reprimand and pay $300,000. In exchange, Gingrich wanted the three charges repackaged as a single count.
He did not ask that any of the charges be dismissed, only that all three be consolidated as a single charge.
The committee report says the consolidated charge was to include “all of the conduct described in the original” three counts. Gingrich also asked that the word “knew” be removed from the portion of the charge discussing the submission of false and unreliable documents to the subcommittee.
Despite the repackaging, the underlying conduct supporting the original three charges remained in the document.
Under these circumstances it is not accurate for Gingrich to claim that all but one of the Ethics Committee charges were dismissed, let alone that they were dismissed as "phony," as he told CNN on Jan. 22.
Ethics Committee Counsel James Cole was asked later why the committee agreed to repackage the three charges into a single count as Gingrich requested.
“The basic view of the members of the committee and myself was that that was fairly meaningless in terms of these proceedings,” Cole said at a press conference. “There would not be any extra sanction in my view, or in the view of the members, if there were three counts versus one count, as long as all the behavior and the conduct was adequately represented in the statement of alleged violation.”
Politics at play?
Fifteen years later, Gingrich is using the repackaging of the three allegations into one to imply not only that certain charges had been dismissed prior to his reprimand, but that he was an innocent victim of partisan politics.
“The Democrats had filed 84 charges; 83 had been thrown out as totally phony,” Gingrich said in an interview with CNN on Jan. 22.
He returned to the issue during the Republican debate in Tampa.
“The Democrats had filed 84 ethics charges for a simple reason: We had taken control of the House after 40 years, and they were very bitter,” he said.
There is no doubt that politics played a role in the Gingrich ethics battle, but at the time of his reprimand Republicans controlled the House.
The bipartisan Ethics Committee voted 7 to 1 (3 Republicans and 4 Democrats against 1 Republican) to recommend to the full House of Representatives that Gingrich be sanctioned. The House agreed, voting 395 to 28.
It marked the first time in the history of Congress that a speaker has received a reprimand for unethical conduct.
Some Republicans refused to support the committee’s recommendation of a reprimand, but most voted to approve the sanction.
“I found it extraordinarily imprudent of Mr. Gingrich not to seek and follow a less aggressive course of action in tax areas he knew to be sensitive and controversial,” investigation subcommittee chairman Porter Goss (R) of Florida said after the vote. “And even more troubling, I found the fact that the committee was given inaccurate, unreliable, and incomplete information to be a very serious failure on his part.”
