In an appearance Friday on Fox News, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was lying about why former President Bill Clinton got impeached.
As you may have heard, Pelosi went on CNN for one of their “town halls” in which politicians answer mostly obsequious questions about how awesome it is being Nancy Pelosi and how she’s going to make sure being Donald Trump isn’t awesome at all.
One of the “tough” questions was why she didn’t impeach George W. Bush during her first stint as speaker (which began in 2007 and ended in 2011) and why she wasn’t in favor of impeaching Trump earlier this year.
“When I became speaker the first time, there was overwhelming call for me to impeach President Bush on the strength of the war in Iraq, which I vehemently opposed,” she said Thursday.
“I knew there were no nuclear weapons in Iraq. It just wasn’t there,” Pelosi added. “They had to show the Gang of Four all the intelligence they had. The intelligence did not show that that was the case. So I knew it was a misrepresentation to the public. But having said that, it was a — in my view, not a grounds for impeachment.”
“They had impeached Bill Clinton for personal indiscretion and misrepresenting about it,” she continued. “Some of these same people are [now] saying, ‘Oh, this doesn’t rise to impeachment.’ Right there, impeaching Bill Clinton for being stupid in terms of something like that.”
After some laughs, Pelosi said, “I mean, I love him, I think he was a great president, but being stupid in terms of that, and what would somebody do, not to embarrass their family. But in any event, so they did Bill Clinton, now they want me to do George Bush, I just didn’t want it to be a way of life in our country.”
Appearing Friday on Fox News, Gingrich noted that this wasn’t exactly what happened, saying she “deliberately and methodically lied” about the Clinton impeachment.
“It’s a total dishonest lie, and she knows it’s a lie,” he said.
”We had 11 counts in which Clinton was found guilty by an independent counsel in a report. There’s zero counts of guilty for Trump.”
He also noted that one of those counts was perjury — an offense which can lead to jail time and which did cost Clinton his license to practice law in Arkansas.
“This was never about sex in the Oval Office. It was about the rule of law and whether or not the president could commit perjury,” Gingrich said. “Nancy Pelosi last night deliberately and methodically lied to the American people.”
And this is, well, accurate.
President Trump may exaggerate and bloviate, yes. That’s not impeachable. Perjury is, and that’s what Clinton did. There wasn’t any debate about that, particularly not after a certain blue dress came to light.
We don’t have an independent counsel. We don’t have 11 counts, including perjury. We haven’t had a drawn-out process.
What we have is a short, directed impeachment inquiry in which the Democrats have insisted that Trump tried to enlist a foreign government to aid in his re-election.
And yet, some of the same people who are trying to get him impeached thought that impeaching Clinton was all about trying to overturn the results of an election along a party-line vote
But then, this isn’t about consistency. It’s all about selling the impeachment — even as the untruths pile up.
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