Newt Gingrich faulted Mitt Romney for “maniacally repeating” an attack that recalls ethics charges against then-House Speaker Gingrich, but does not acknowledge that Gingrich was exonerated from the charges, which were the product of partisan dislike for Gingrich.
Gingrich accused Romney, on ABC’s This Week, of propogating a “phony history” of the ethics charges lodged against Gingrich when he was House Speaker in the mid-1990s, adding that Romney “maniacally continues to repeat” that history. He responded to a controversial Romney ad featuring Tom Brokaw’s coverage of the ethics charges. “I was attacked 84 times by the Democrats because I led the Republican Party out of the wilderness, and for the first time in 40 years, we were a majority,” Gingrich explained. “Every single one of the substantive charges was ultimately thrown out, period.”
“[Romney has] run a campaign of vilification,” Gingrich also said. “And I can assure you that all the way to the convention we’re going to have a fight over whether or not somebody can be fundamentally dishonest and try to hide their liberal record in Massachusetts and try to hide their past, in terms of voting for Democrats, and get to be the nominee.”
The Washington Examiner‘s Byron York recently revisited the ethics charges, recalling how “Gingrich was exonerated” by the IRS. “The bottom line: Gingrich acted properly and violated no laws,” Byron explains. “There was no tax fraud scheme. Of course, by that time, Gingrich was out of office, widely presumed to be guilty of something, and his career in politics was (seemingly) over.”
