The House ethics committee’s appointment last week of a special counsel to examine possible campaign violations by Gingrich could not have come at a worse time. The speaker has been badly hurt just as he enters this week’s crucial budget negotiations. Even in dismissing some charges, the ethics committee used words that will spear the speaker in attack ads. Gingrich’s $4.5 million book advance – which he later returned – was legal, the committee said, but it “creates the impression of exploiting one’s office for personal gain.”
Gingrich tried to belittle the remaining charges as trivial and technical. But no one in Washington believes they will just go away. Gingrich must now live in that special hell reserved for targets of special counsels – lawyers who can take the most narrow-seeming mandate and use it to pry into every cranny of a politician’s career. So far, there is no suggestion of criminal penalties. But the political costs are already high. Even back in Georgia, a new poll shows 50 percent of voters disapprove of him.
Gingrich himself gave the opposition its first damning evidence. In 1989 GOPAC, the fund-raising group Gingrich headed until last spring, sent a letter to wealthy would-be contributors. Unfortunately for Gingrich, one of these “Dear Friend” letters was mailed to the brother-in-law of David Worley, a young Atlanta lawyer who happened to be Gingrich’s Democratic congressional opponent. Worley thought the letter was suspicious. Set up to promote Republican candidates at the state and local level, GOPAC worked outside the campaign laws governing federal elections – rules that limit the size of donations and require full disclosure. This particular fund-raising letter, signed by Gingrich, was clearly aimed at creating an army of Republicans to unseat the Democratic Congress.
Worley turned the letter over to his campaign consultant – Jost, a native Californian who had just left his job raising money for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Jost gave the mailing to the DCCC, which filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission. Predictably, the somewhat timid FEC did nothing. But Jost had planted an important seed. He also made it his personal business to take on Gingrich, whom he recognized as a threat to congressional Democrats.
Worley lost to Gingrich in ‘90. In ‘94, Jost shifted his allegiance to another Gingrich challenger, Ben Jones, a former congressman and former TV actor best known as Cooter in “The Dukes of Hazzard.” Jost’s next find came from a Georgia Democrat named Steve Bruning, who had dug up incriminating documents about Gingrich’s TV college lecture course, “Renewing American Civilization.” The course, given at a publicly funded state college, was promoting the GOP agenda, as well as donors whose business successes were lavishly praised in Gingrich’s lectures. Records showed that operatives from both Gingrich’s office and GOPAC were involved in running and raising money for the course. Jost told NEWSWEEK he was “blown away” by the details.
This time, Jost and his client, Jones, drew up a complaint, which House Democrats took to the ethics committee in 1994. Still, little happened. Jones tried to make an issue of Gingrich’s ethics, but he was largely ignored and roundly beaten.
Bigger target: This was the election that transformed Congress, making Gingrich speaker – and a much bigger target. During the GOP’s first 100 Days, Jost fed documents to suddenly eager reporters. And by now Jost was getting advice from a few bitter former Gingrich aides, some of whom were in contact with Gingrich’s ex-wife, Jackie, the speaker’s high-school math teacher whom he divorced in 1981. At the same time, NEWSWEEK has learned, a handful of old Gingrich advisers and the former Mrs. Gingrich unsuccessfully shopped a book proposal about Newt’s failings to New York publishers.
Then, two weeks ago, the original complaint to the FEC – inspired by Jost six years earlier – finally became relevant when the FEC released 6,000 pages of documents about the inner workings of GOPAC. They seemed to show that GOPAC had supported Gingrich’s 1990 campaign against Worley, which was decided by only 974 votes. And ethics-committee chairman Nancy Johnson, whom Democrats accused of stonewalling for the speaker, was listed in one memo as a GOPAC recruiter. Johnson had no choice but to call in an independent investigator.
Gingrich now faces months of depositions and huge legal fees. Democrats will try to find moral equivalence between GOPAC and Whitewater, and hope the two cancel each other out. Gingrich will be distracted. And all because a small-time Democratic operator had learned – from Gingrich, no less – the tricks and power of the long, slow smear.
