Newt Gingrich says Freddie Mac didn't want anything special for its $1.6 million
(Gingrich photo: Chris Keane/Reuters)
Yesterday, Newt Gingrich
said he was a political outsider. Today, he says controversy over Freddie Mac's payment of at least $1.6 million to him for "strategic advice" is a
reminder that he's an insider.
“It reminds people that I know a great deal about Washington and if you want to change Washington, we just tried four years of amateur ignorance and it didn’t work very well, so having somebody who knows Washington might be a really good thing," he said.
And why did Freddie Mac want somebody who "knows Washington" on their payroll?
His campaign denied Gingrich did any lobbying for the mortgage company and its statement reiterated that the contact was with Gingrich's company.
"Speaker Gingrich’s consulting firm, The Gingrich Group, was retained in 2006 by Freddie Mac. To be clear, Speaker Gingrich did no lobbying of any kind, nor did his firm. This was expressly written into the Gingrich Group contracts. Instead, the Gingrich Group was hired to offer strategic advice to Freddie Mac on a number of issues," the statement said.
Nonetheless, Gingrich adamantly denied he was an influence peddler:
“I tend to give the same strategic advice in private I give in public,” Gingrich said at the Iowa Energy Forum in Des Moines, according to a transcript from Radio Iowa.
Well, if he says the same thing in public that he says in private, what in the world was Freddie Mac paying for? They could have just turned on radio or television, right?
Sure, except while Gingrich was getting cozy with Freddie Mac in private, in public he was trashing Democrats for allegedly doing the same thing. He even demanded an investigation of efforts by Freddie Mac and other institutions to influence politicians with money. Last month, he said Barney Frank should have been thrown in jail for having ties to Freddie Mac. And now Freddie Mac insiders say the advice Newt Gingrich gave them bears no resemblance to what he's been saying on the campaign trail.
All of which is a reminder that the one unifying thread in Newt Gingrich's life is that he is a pathological prevaricator. And if there's a lie that is too big for him to tell, he's yet to encounter it.