Anyway, Gingrich appears to be right. He was not "fined" by an ethics committee.
House Reprimands, Penalizes Speaker
The House voted overwhelmingly yesterday to reprimand House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and order him to pay an unprecedented $300,000 penalty, the first time in the House's 208-year history it has disciplined a speaker for ethical wrongdoing.He was penalized by the REPUBLICAN MAJORITY in the house. He was not "fined" by an ethics committee.
Why Gingrich thinks this is BETTER for him, I can't say. I'd rather blame my penalty on some stupid bipartisan committee than have to admit that my republican colleagues who had previously made me speaker had now penalized me $300,000 to repay the costs of the ethics committee investigation that were caused by me giving misleading information.
Gingrich agreed to this settlement, and admitted to wrongdoing:
At a closed-door meeting of House Republicans yesterday morning, the speaker noted his agreement to accept the sanction, which the ethics committee approved on a 7 to 1 vote Friday night, and said he wanted to get the matter behind him, according to lawmakers who attended.I doubty it he took this to court that any judge is going to rule there is a substantive difference between claiming he was "fined" and what actually happened. But maybe he'd win.
However, it's a lot easier just to threaten lawsuits and hope you can cow people into doing your bidding. We've seen Obama pull that off time and again.
Eighty four politically motivated ethics charges were filed against Newt when he was Speaker of the House regarding the use of tax exempt funds for a college course he taught titled “Renewing American Civilization.” Eighty-three of the eighty-four charges were found to be without merit and dropped. The remaining charge had to do with contradictory documents prepared by Newt’s lawyer supplied during the course of the investigation. Newt took responsibility for the error and agreed to reimburse the committee the cost of the investigation into that discrepancy. In 1999, after a 3 ½ year investigation, the Internal Revenue Service (under President Bill Clinton, nonetheless) concluded that Gingrich did not violate any tax laws, leading renowned CNN Investigative Reporter Brooks Jackson to remark on air “it turns out [Gingrich] was right and those who accused him of tax fraud were wrong.”
So anti-Newters should make a trivial change in the news story to clarify the nature of the non-fine “fine” (sanction, restitution, whatever it actually was) then Newt won’t have a leg to stand on any more when complaining about it.
“I’d rather blame my penalty on some stupid bipartisan committee than have to admit that my republican colleagues who had previously made me speaker had now penalized me $300,000 to repay the costs of the ethics committee investigation that were caused by me giving misleading information.”
You’d rather lie than set the record straight?
http://www.rightgrrl.com/carolyn/newt.html
Dishonest people stop at telling the whole truth - that the RATs, pelosi among them, spent 3 years and over 80 charges trying to get Newt on anything they could - they finally were able to ‘nail him’ on one nebulous charge - But you all leave out the part where the IRS - of all outfits - found that the charge was NOT TRUE and exonerated Newt.
You Half-truthers make me sick...especially posting in FR