WASHINGTON — Bill Clinton’s impeachment over his affair with Monica Lewinsky was “a mistake,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich stunningly admitted in the latest episode of “Pod Force One.”
The Georgia Republican, who championed Slick Willie’s impeachment in late 1998 on charges of lying under oath and obstruction of justice, reflected that the process got “trivialized” by the sex scandal.
“I think it was a mistake because the real problem wasn’t Lewinsky,” Gingrich told The Post’s Miranda Devine, when asked if “it was a mistake to impeach him over the Monica Lewinsky scandal.”
“The real problem was he had committed perjury in a case involving sexual harassment while he was governor,” the former speaker explained. “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.”
In 1994, then-Attorney General Janet Reno appointed Independent Counsel Ken Starr to helm the Whitewater investigation, over concerns about a real estate company the Clintons owned.
Eventually, Starr’s team expanded its purview to other areas, including former Arkansas state employee Paula Jones’ lawsuit against the 42nd president for sexual harassment.
Her lawyers deposed Slick Willie and asked him if he had an affair with Lewinsky, amid a bevy of rumors swirling around DC that he did. Clinton denied the accusations.
The Starr Report concluded that Clinton lied under oath, which prompted House Republicans to pursue impeachment, making him the second president in US history to face such proceedings.
“I always argued the question, ‘Is he allowed 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,” Gingrich reflected.
“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 401(k) because of some stupid intern, we are going to be mad at you.’”
“And I realized at that point I had completely misunderstood how the culture was evolving.”
Clinton had used his sharp legal mind to put up a jaw-dropping defense, quibbling over the definition of the word “is” and fussing over semantics about sex.
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Ultimately, he wasn’t slick enough. A judge held Clinton in civil contempt for misleading testimony in the Jones lawsuit, and his license to practice law was later suspended for five years. He was also stripped of his ability to present cases before the Supreme Court.
Still, the 42nd president managed to get acquitted by the Senate.
Gingrich himself was forced out of the speakership a few weeks before Clinton’s acquittal amid frustrations with the GOP’s rare midterm loss setback for a party out of power and controversy over an ethics issue.
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Ironically, he later copped to having an affair with a woman two decades younger than him during the impeachment proceedings.
Despite the GOP’s electoral setback, one benefit the impeachment saga had was that it deterred Al Gore from campaigning heavily with Clinton in the 2000 election, according to Gingrich.
“[Clinton] actually left office at the high point of his popularity,” Gingrich said. “I think Gore was actually offended by the whole [saga]; if Gore had understood that and had campaigned more with him, he might have beaten George W. [Bush].
“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.”
