THE REPUBLICAN presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich received up to $1.8 million in fees from the government-backed mortgage company Freddie Mac, Bloomberg News reported yesterday.
The revelation is the latest in a series of blows to candidates seeking to unseat the former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney as the favourite to win the nomination.
It is all the more damning because Mr Gingrich, a former speaker of the House, last month condemned the Democratic Representative Barney Frank, the former chairman of the House financial services committee, for having ties to Freddie Mac.
“Go back and look at the lobbyists [Frank] was close to at Freddie Mac,” Mr Gingrich said in a Republican debate on October 11th. “Everybody in the media who wants to go after the business community ought to start by going after the politicians who have been at the heart of the sickness.”
In his 2011 book To Save America, Mr Gingrich wrote that Freddic Mac and its sister institution Fannie Mae “are so thoroughly politicised and preside over such irresponsible lending policies that they need to be replaced with smaller, private companies operating without government guarantees, whose leaders focus on making a profit, not manipulating politicians”.
In 2008, Mr Gingrich said that Barack Obama should return campaign contributions from executives at Freddie Mac.
Mr Gingrich began receiving monthly payments of between $25,000 and $30,000 from Freddie Mac just five months after he resigned from office in 1999. Freddie Mac paid him $300,000 a year in 2006 and 2007.
In a recent debate, Mr Gingrich was asked why he received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Freddie Mac. (The full extent of his payments was not yet known.) Mr Gingrich said the mortgage company sought his advice as a historian.
This week, Mr Gingrich denied reports that he was in fact hired to influence fellow Republicans who oppose government involvement in the mortgage market. Mr Gingrich said he didn’t know how much he received from Freddie Mac.
Mr Gingrich also published dozens of articles and delivered speeches praising companies who paid up to $200,000 to join his Center for Health Transformation, a for-profit think tank, USA Today reported yesterday. Mr Gingrich made the statements without revealing that the healthcare companies were his clients.
Mr Gingrich’s campaign appeared to have collapsed last June. His staff resigned en masse when he and his wife, Callista, returned from a luxury cruise through the Greek islands, shortly after it became known that Mr Gingrich kept a $500,000 credit line at Tiffany to buy jewels for Callista. But memories are short in American politics, and Mr Gingrich, who has been the most pompous of eight Republican candidates in debates, was virtually tied with Mr Romney in two opinion polls this week.
A Fox News poll published on November 16th showed Mr Gingrich leading with 23 per cent to 22 per cent for Mr Romney. Asked which candidate they would most trust with nuclear weapons, Mr Gingrich led with 30 per cent, compared to only 17 per cent for Mr Romney.