http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2012/01/31/the_florida_smear_campaign/print
The Republican establishment is pulling out all the stops to try to keep Newt Gingrich from becoming the party’s nominee for President of the United States — and some are not letting the facts get in their way.
Among the claims going out through the mass media in Florida, on the eve of that state’s primary election, is that Newt Gingrich “resigned in disgrace” as Speaker of the House of Representatives, as a result of unethical conduct involving the diversion of tax-exempt money. Mitt Romney is calling on Gingrich to release “all of the records” from the House of Representatives investigation.
But the Wall Street Journal of January 28, 2012 reported that these records — 1,280 pages of them — are already publicly available on-line. Although Speaker Gingrich decided not to take on the task of fighting the charge from his political enemies in 1997, the Internal Revenue Service conducted its own investigation which, two years later, exonerated Gingrich from the charges. His resignation was not due to those charges and occurred much later.
Do the Romney camp and the Republican establishment not know this, a dozen years later? Or are they far less concerned with whether the charges will stand up than they are about smearing Gingrich on the eve of the Florida primaries?