Why was gingrich censure

It should be noted, and is clear, he did not seek nor intend to mislead the committee. The investigation lasted more than two years and was often surrounded by intense partisanship inside and outside the ethics committee. Gingrich is only the second speaker to be subjected to an ethics committee investigation. Former Speaker Jim Wright, D-Texas, resigned in rather than continue to fight charges initiated by Gingrich himself.

While the House can impose a penalty as severe as expulsion, that has been confined to actions like taking the Confederate side in the Civil War. The Georgia Republican has been a lightning rod for controversy since he entered the House in , and his frequent filings of ethics complaints against Democrats led to a series of filings against him.

The current case has been characterized by his aides, his colleagues and himself as a political vendetta by Democrats unwilling to accept the Republican majority Gingrich engineered in the elections.

But the charges had grown more serious, especially after the ethics committee decided to hire James Cole, a former career federal prosecutor, to handle the case late last year. Recently, the flash point of controversy had been whether Gingrich had provided the ethics committee with false information.

The committee concluded that he did so when he told the full ethics committee in writing in December and March that GOPAC, the political action committee he headed until , had nothing to do with a course he taught at Kennesaw State College and Reinhardt College in Georgia.

And I thought it was a new low," he added. View the discussion thread. Skip to main content. A must-read political newsletter that breaks news and catches you up on what is happening. Most Popular - Easy to read, daily digest of the news from The Hill and around the world. But the fact that he was not charged and convicted criminally by the IRS does not mean he was somehow exonerated from the House ethics charges.

There is a long and well-established ban on using tax-exempt contributions to favor one side or the other in a political campaign. Gingrich insisted his college course was merely educational, and not campaign-oriented. The Ethics Committee asked Gingrich about why he did not consult a tax lawyer before establishing the tax-exempt fundraising network around his project.

He said he was simply teaching a college course. The Ethics Committee considered whether to rule on the legal issue but ultimately declined to decide whether Gingrich violated tax laws, according to the committee report. Instead, it focused on his conduct with an eye toward enforcing House ethics rules.

On Dec. He apologized not for breaking the law but for displaying poor judgment. This admission and apology stands in stark contrast to more recent comments by the former speaker on the campaign trail. The Ethics Committee left it to the IRS to determine whether his alleged use of tax-exempt groups for political purposes was illegal. The IRS subsequently upheld the tax-exempt status of two foundations linked to Gingrich and ruled that their support of the Gingrich course did not violate tax law.

But in one of the cases, the IRS complained that the House Ethics Committee had refused to provide the agency with transcripts of confidential testimony given by foundation officials to the committee. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. But you know what? We change lives.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. Negotiations ensued. A key sticking point was the implication that Gingrich had purposely lied to the committee. At an early morning meeting with his lawyers, Gingrich aides protested when they saw that the Gingrich statement approved by Cole did not state explicitly that the violations were unintentional, according to a source who attended the meeting.

He cited a letter Gingrich wrote to the committee Oct. Gingrich did not acknowledge any problem, Cole said. Cole underscored how much was at stake. If the subcommittee had found that Gingrich had deliberately lied, Cole said, he would have recommended that Gingrich be censured--a punishment that would have forced him to step down as speaker.

She returned to the Washington bureau in after spending eight years covering politics and Congress for the Wall Street Journal. Her first stint with The Times was in covering Congress and politics. Knight Fellowship for Professional Journalists. She is a graduate of Harvard University.