Newt Gingrich’s Long Ties to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

In his effort to savage Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich has tried to make much of Romney's time at Bain Capital and Romney's job killing corporate agenda. Gingrich conveniently tries to ignore his own long involvement with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which have wreaked far more havoc on average Americans through their insane actions in the lead up to the housing bubble's collapse. To Newt, history is whatever is convenient at any moment in time and one sometimes has to wonder whether he's a pathological liar or simply so blinded by his ego that truth becomes whatever is expedient at the moment. The New York Times looks at the length and depth of Gingrich's involvement with the two residential mortgage giants. Here are some highlights:

Two of the sponsors for part of the Ireland trip were frequent partners of Mr. Gingrich: Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae — the government-backed housing industry giants that Mr. Gingrich has denounced as he fights to stay in contention against Mitt Romney in the Republican primaries.

Mr. Gingrich has faced many questions recently about the more than $1.6 million in consulting fees he got from Freddie Mac since leaving Congress in 1999. But part of the relationship started years earlier, as records and interviews show that Mr. Gingrich, as House leader in the 1990s, aligned himself with Freddie and Fannie on a number of key issues — defending them in Congress against political attacks, joining with them on housing projects and seeing top aides go work for them.

While Mr. Gingrich has minimized his past connections to the two closely related companies on the campaign trail, his Congressional record shows that his political and financial ties to the firms run deeper and farther back than he has acknowledged publicly and, in fact, set the stage for the lucrative consulting work that followed.

Mr. Gingrich, whose campaign declined to comment on his ties with Fannie and Freddie while in Congress, has been blistering in his recent criticism of the mortgage finance companies. He has blamed them in part for the 2008 housing collapse, said they should now be “broken up,” and in an October debate he declared that Representative Barney Frank should be “in jail” for associating with lobbyists close to Freddie.

But while in Congress, Mr. Gingrich had kind words for the companies. Announcing a housing partnership in Atlanta in 1995, for instance, he held up Fannie as “an excellent example of a former government institution fulfilling its mandate while functioning in the market economy.”

Mr. Gingrich’s help was seen as particularly crucial after the Republicans took control of the House in 1994, as Freddie and Fannie tried to turn back rising hostility from some Republicans over their mission, structure and financing. Once he became speaker in 1995, Mr. Gingrich’s support loomed large as the companies sought to shore up flagging confidence among the Republicans and bolster the case for home ownership, officials said.

In a showdown critical to the companies’ fortunes, Mr. Gingrich played an important behind-the-scenes role in helping block a proposal in 1995 that would have forced Fannie and Freddie — rather than taxpayers — to pay potentially billions of dollars in increased fees, according to interviews and press accounts at the time.

[M]onths after Mr. Gingrich left Congress, his direct involvement became clear, as his consulting company signed a $25,000-a-month contract with Freddie. In 2006, he signed a second contract with Freddie as a strategic adviser, a role he described initially as a “historian.” Mr. Romney has branded the work as “influence peddler.”

The bottom line is that Gingrich is slimy and definitely challenged when it comes to truth and veracity.