Sunday, September 30, 2007

Newt: What Happened?   [Byron York]

Political insiders are reacting skeptically ­ to say the least ­ to Newt Gingrich’s assertion that he was all ready to go with his presidential exploratory campaign but called it off at the last second because he learned that doing so, while staying with his activist group, American Solutions, would violate campaign finance laws. On ABC’s This Week this morning, Gingrich said:

The McCain-Feingold Act criminalizes politics. We learned yesterday morning — this was the decisive moment. I had taken leave from Fox. [Gingrich adviser] Randy Evans had taken leave from his law firm. We had a Web site set up to launch on Monday. And we were informed yesterday morning that if I had any communication with American Solutions after I became a candidate, it was a criminal offense.

Gingrich said that American Solutions is “technically a 527, which is a form of fundraising, which allows us to develop ideas” but does not allow him to run for president at the same time. That was the problem, Gingrich said — not any lack of response. “Without having even set the Web site up, Randy’s estimate was we had several million dollars in pledges,” Gingrich continued. “I think we would clearly have been competitive financially within three weeks, and we literally had not even set up the Web site yet.”

But then, at the very moment he was set to go, Gingrich got the last-second legal opinion that he couldn’t run without violating the law. A lot of people familiar with the political world aren’t buying that explanation. “It’s absurd,” one insider told me this morning. “You’re telling me he really just found out you can’t run a 527 and run for president at the same time?”

After the ABC interview, I asked Gingrich spokesman Rick Tyler why it all seemed to happen so late. “I don’t know,” Tyler told me. “You’d have to ask Randy Evans the exact process.” But Tyler explained that events moved very quickly in the last few days, stemming from Gingrich’s decision to seek pledges for campaign contributions, as opposed to actual contributions. “There were people looking at the legality of that, and there didn’t appear to be any inconsistency, because we would not have been raising for money, we would have been asking for pledges,” Tyler told me. Then, yesterday morning, as Gingrich was going ahead with the final day of his big “Solutions” project ­ there were 30 workshops going out nationwide to 2,000 locations, plus Internet and satellite TV ­ counsel at McKenna, Long, Evans’s firm, sent Gingrich a legal opinion that the presidential effort could result in Federal Election Commission complaints and possible criminal charges being filed against Gingrich. “Say Newt is on a trip for American Solutions and they paid for air fare and hotel, and he had one conversation with someone who strongly supported a Newt candidacy,” Tyler hypothesized. “You could easily be looking at an FEC complaint.”

But how come he didn’t know that earlier? I asked Tyler. “I don’t know,” Tyler said.

Tyler told me that Gingrich had just told Fox News Friday of his decision to take a leave. “Friday, the decision was made to sever the relationship with Fox for Fox’s sake,” Tyler said. “We proactively went to them and said we are going forward with soliciting pledges, and we think it would be best if the contractual relationship was suspended. We had always told them we would keep them apprised of any change in status.”

09/30 11:49 AMShare