Freddie Mac paid Newt Gingrich $30,000 per hour for advice

Jed Lewison

Community

Friday November 18, 2011 · 2:04 PM PST

2011/11/18 · 14:04

no image description available — Free piece of advice: Don't pay Newt so much money! (Gingrich photo: Chris Keane/Reuters)

Free piece of advice: Don't pay Newt so much money! (Gingrich photo: Chris Keane/Reuters)

Dan Eggen does the math:

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is stepping up his defense of his lucrative consulting career, in part by arguing that he didn’t do very much to earn all that money.
In an interview late Thursday on Fox News, Gingrich said that he only worked about an hour a month giving advice to Freddie Mac, the quasi-public mortage company that paid him up to $1.8 million in fees.

Given previous reports on the size of the payments, that would suggest that Gingrich earned up to $30,000 an hour giving Freddie Mac strategic advice.

“I think less than maybe once a month, they would drop by,” Gingrich said. “We’d spend an hour. It would always start with me listening. I’d always say, ‘What are you trying to solve? What are your concerns? What are you trying to get done?’ And I’ve done this with many, many clients.”

No wonder Newt says it's challenging to be without his consulting paycheck. Once you get used to earning $30,000 an hour, it's got to be really hard to step down to the everyday lifestyle of merely being the Republican frontrunner.

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Freddie Mac paid Newt Gingrich $30,000 per hour for advice

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