Newt Gingrich just went on record and said what Republicans never wanted to admit about the Clinton impeachment.
He says the whole thing was a mistake. And the reason why will make you furious.
Because what they let Clinton walk away with became the playbook Democrats used to go after Trump twice.
As Swamp Digest reports:
Newt Gingrich oversaw the 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton over Clinton’s perjury in the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit when he lied about having an affair with Monica Lewinsky, which led to Clinton’s infamous line about “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”
The impeachment backfired on every front.
Bill Clinton easily won acquittal as 10 Republicans joined 45 Democrats to vote not guilty
Politically, Republicans paid a price.
Normally, a President in the sixth year of their Presidency gets pummeled in the midterm elections.
George Bush lost control of both Houses of Congress in his sixth year in office.
Republicans gained nine Senate seats in Barack Obama’s sixth year.
But Americans were fed up with the impeachment trial, as they saw it as a distraction and an impeachment over sex.
And as a result, Democrats gained five seats in the House and didn’t lose any seats in the Senate.
Gingrich looked back on the impeachment in an interview with New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, where Gingrich admitted the impeachment was a mistake because Americans didn’t understand that Republicans impeached Clinton for committing a felony, perjury under oath, instead of about sex.
“I think it was a mistake, because the real problem wasn’t Lewinsky,” Gingrich stated. “The real problem was that he committed perjury in a case involving sexual harassment when he was governor. And perjury’s a felony.”
Gingrich explained to Devine that he knew the impeachment was doomed when his daughters complained that attempting to remove Clinton could tank the stock market.
“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,” Gingrich added.
“I realized at that point I had completely misunderstood how the culture was evolving,” Gingrich continued.
Clinton survived impeachment because of the dot.com boom, which saw the S&P 500 skyrocket 26% during the impeachment proceedings from October 1998 to February 1999.
As a result of the booming stock market, Clinton’s approval shot up to 67%.
Devine expressed her belief that the impeachment of Clinton opened the door for Democrats to impeach Republican Presidents over trivial matters.
“Wow,” Devine exclaimed, adding that “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 admitted Democrats didn’t walk through that door during George W. Bush’s Presidency, but did twice with two impeachment hoaxes against President Trump.
Finally, Gingrich theorized that the impeachment failed because while Americans thought Clinton was a man of low character, the affair with Lewinsky didn’t affect his ability to do his job.
“You know that you didn’t necessarily want your daughter to go out on a date with him, but that didn’t matter,” Gingrich concluded.