Urbandale, Iowa

Newt Gingrich responded to a report from Bloomberg News today that he earned upward of $1.8 million in consulting fees from Freddie Mac, the quasi-public home mortgage firm. Speaking with reporters outside a restaurant in this Des Moines suburb, Gingrich said he offered the firm, which has been in conservatorship since the 2008 financial crisis, “strategic advice” over a period of eight years through his private consulting firm the Gingrich Group.

“I’d give the same strategic advice in private as I would in public,” Gingrich said. At the CNBC debate last week, the former speaker of the House was asked about a payment of $300,000 from Freddie Mac in 2006, and he responded that he had been brought in to consult as a “historian” and that he “offered them advice on precisely what they didn’t do” in the run-up to the bursting of the home mortgage bubble in 2007 and 2008.