Gingrich: It Was A Mistake To Impeach Bill Clinton Over The Monica Lewinsky Scandal
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich sits down with Miranda Devine to discuss a winning midterm strategy for Republicans:
MIRANDA DEVINE, NEW YORK POST, ‘POD FORCE ONE’ HOST: Can I ask you, back with Bill Clinton, do you think in hindsight, it was a mistake to impeach him over the Monica Lewinsky scandal? FORMER SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE NEWT GINGRICH: Yes. I think it was a mistake. Because the real problem wasn’t Lewinsky. The real problem was he’d committed perjury in a case involving sexual harassment when he was governor. And perjury is a felony. In fact, he was stripped of his law license in Arkansas after he left the presidency, and for five years couldn’t practice, because he clearly committed a felony. And so I always argued the question is, are you allow to commit felonies? But by allowing, and this is partly the way the report was written, by allowing it to be about sex, it trivialized it. I realized that we were really off course in August of that year, when I was at the OK Cafe in Atlanta with my two daughters, who at that time were, I guess, in their early 20s. And they both said to me, if our friends lose money on their 401k because of some stupid intern, we are going to be mad at you. Because frankly, it ain’t a big enough deal for us to lose a lot of money. I realized at that point, I had completely misunderstood how the culture was evolving. DEVINE: Wow. And I guess also it meant that the Democrats had a talking point, which was you impeached our president over a triviality. Therefore, anything goes in the future. GINGRICH: No, I don’t know. I don’t know if that happened or not, because they didn’t particularly do it to George W. But what it did do, I was once at the Green Room, I think to meet the press, with one of Clinton’s lawyers who was very close to him. So while we were talking about all this, he said, he turned to Clinton at one point and said, in April, you went on national TV and said, I did not have sex with that woman. He said, why did you do that? He said, because they were going to impeach me in 30 days, unless I stopped it. And so I had to lie, or I would have been impeached. And given those two choices, it’s for him, but took the right choice. Once, but once it was over, and once people had, and basically the American people had concluded that it was not a large enough problem to impeach him, that made him look stupid. You know, you didn’t necessarily want your daughter to go out on a date with him. But that didn’t matter. He actually left office at the high point of his popularity. And if Gore had understood that, because I think Gore was actually offended by the whole, if Gore understood that, and he campaigned more with him, he might have beaten George W. But he consciously wanted to be a step away from Clinton. And Gore was frankly not popular enough to be a step away from Clinton.
