On Monday afternoon, the Gingrich campaign deployed former congressman J.C. Watts, a key lobbyist in rewriting federal regulations overseeing Freddie Mac, to defend the former speaker.
Watts said Gingrich was never a part of the discussions on Capitol Hill about Freddie Mac.
View former House speaker Newt Gingrich’s 2010 federal tax return.
“In the six years that I was chairman of FM Policy focus, we had Republican and Democrat consultants that were part of our meetings,” Watts said. “We talked to Republican and Democrat members of Congress. We talked to Wall Street types. And the first time I heard Newt Gingrich’s name was probably 45 days ago.”
Former Minnesota governor and Romney surrogate Tim Pawlenty, on a conference call with reporters, said “the notion that he was paid $1.7 million as a historian for Freddie Mac is just BS.”
“Newt Gingrich has represented hundreds of clients and interest groups in Washington, D.C., since he left the speakership,” Pawlenty said. “To say that he wasn’t a lobbyist is incredible hairsplitting.”
Romney dismissed Gingrich’s contention that his work for corporate clients did not fall within the legal definition of being a lobbyist.
“If you’re working for a company, getting paid for a company through one of your many entities and then you’re speaking with congressmen in a way that would help that company, that’s lobbying,” Romney said. “If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it is a duck.”
Romney also accused Gingrich of being a “highly erratic” leader through the course of his career.
He noted that Gingrich voted in favor of establishing the Department of Education, yet now says the department should be eliminated and its authority sent to the states. And Romney said Gingrich is “opposed vehemently” to the Massachusetts health-care system “and yet just a couple of years ago wrote about what a superb system it was.”
Romney added: “He’s gone from pillar to post almost like a pinball machine, from item to item in a way which is highly erratic and does not suggest a stable, thoughtful course which is normally associated with leadership.”
Staff writers Tim Farnam and Amy Gardner in Washington contributed to this report.
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