The facts are quite clear. Newt admitted his guilt and the overwelming majorities of the ethics committee and the House voted to reprimand him and fine him $300,000. It was a totally non-partisan decision. He accepted the reprimand and paid the fine. Those are not opinions. Gingrich is the first and only sitting Speaker of the House to be given a reprimand.
I never said he was convicted of the tax charges. Those charges were not part of the reprimand decision. He was later exhonorated of those charges by the IRS.
76 totals charges were filed against Newt. In the end all they got was one charge of false information, information that Newt repeatedly told the truth about, and then mistakenly answered the opposite one single time. Do you understand what that means??
LOL. In understand what a 7-1 vote in the Ethics committee and a 395-28 vote in the House means in terms of Newt's guilt, which he admitted to. He paid the $300,000 fine. 196 Reps voted for the reprimand and 28 against. How is this a partisan witch hunt? J. Randolph Evans, Gingrich’s attorney, said his client "has apologized to the subcommittee, to the House and to the American people."
You can believe in anything you want about the legitimacy of the charges against Gingrich, but the facts are the facts. Do you understand what that means?
Ethics panel votes and House votes are of course opinions, in this case about an ethic charge. They are not facts about the ethics charge. I specifically gave you the facts surrounding the one ethics charge they pinned on Newt and the one ethics charge he finally broke down and agreed to.
You ignore those facts and instead give me vote counts and fine totals. So what is the point of further discussion?
BTW, in the interest of accuracy, Newt never admitted to doing anything illegal or unethical. Your comment above implies otherwise, and you are wrong. Go and read his direct statement after they found him guilty of the one charge.
Or you can continue to believe what you want.
BTW, 85 ethics charges and investigations over four years that lead nowhere is a witch hunt. It's absurd to think such futility isn't. How embarrassing for you to think those were legitimate investigations that weren't grounded in the politics of that time.
You appear to have forgotten the endless propaganda fight the Democrats and the left waged against Newt. And you appear to have forgotten how the House Republicans cut and ran for the own political lives, instead of supporting what was right.
I haven't.
Newt Gingrich has been cleared!!
Remember the uproar regarding Newt's "ethics violations?" People can refresh their memory by reading an article I wrote in 1997 about these charges. In brief, David Bonior brought 75 ethics charges against Newt, 74 which were found to have no merit whatsoever (and people say that Ken Starr is on a "witch hunt?"). The last charge, whether Newt funded his college class "Renewing American Civilization" properly, was too complicated a tax issue for the committee to investigate on its own, so they brought in an outside tax expert to investigate. Two charges arose out of this investigation.
The first 'charge' from the ethics committee is that he "may have" violated tax law by using tax-deductible contributions from nonprofit organizations to teach an allegedly partisan college course.
The second 'charge' from the committee is that, in the course of the investigation, Newt provided false information to the committee. And what was this "false information?" Newt testified that the above contributions were in fact made by those organizations to "Renewing American Civilization." He filed papers that stated the very same thing. This is never a fact that anyone was trying to hide. But one paper filed with the committee stated that those groups did not make the contributions. For this, there was an uproar about Newt's ethics, and he was fined.
Basically, Newt was fined $300,000 because he didn't read his lawyers' documents carefully. I could really get into the hypocrisy of this in light of the fact that people want to excuse Bill Clinton for lying under oath, (maybe if the course Newt had taught was about SEX the Democrats would feel differently) but that's not the point of this article.
Well, after a 3.5 year probe, after Newt paid the $300,000 fine, the IRS announced on February 3, 1999, that it found NO IMPROPRIETIES IN THE TAX FILINGS of Gingrich and the sponsoring Progress and Freedom Foundation. The IRS said the principles taught in the course were not of use only in political campaigns. "The ... course taught principles from American civilization that could be used by each American in everyday life whether the person is a welfare recipient, the head of a large corporation, or a politician."
Well isn't that nice - and isn't that what Newt had been saying all along?
In other words, the ethics charges David Bonior filed against Newt were ALL bogus. Every single one of them. In the end, what was Newt's "ethics problems"? One of the papers filed by his lawyers had an error and Newt didn't catch it. That little oversight cost $300,000.
Some might say "vindication is vindication" and Newt should just be tickled about this. . . but would YOU feel better if you've already lost $300,000 and your job in the process?
Where are the cries about how long and how much money was spent on this investigation? Where are all the news stories about this vindication? Granted, there have been some news stories but certainly not that many. Perhaps the news isn't quite as big when it's Newt who is the one in the right and his accusers are the ones in the wrong.