Gingrich Acknowledges Affair But Says He’s Not a Hypocrite

WASHINGTON — A former House speaker, Newt Gingrich, was having an extramarital affair even as he led the charge against President Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair, he acknowledged in an interview with a conservative Christian group.“The honest answer is yes,” Mr. Gingrich, a potential 2008 Republican presidential candidate, said in an interview with Focus on the Family founder James Dobson to be aired Friday, according to a transcript provided to the Associated Press. “There are times that I have fallen short of my own standards. There’s certainly times when I’ve fallen short of God’s standards.”Mr. Gingrich argued in the interview, however, that he should not be viewed as a hypocrite for pursuing Mr. Clinton’s infidelity.“The president of the United States got in trouble for committing a felony in front of a sitting federal judge,” the former Georgia congressman said of Mr. Clinton’s 1998 House impeachment on perjury and obstruction of justice charges. “I drew a line in my mind that said, ‘Even though I run the risk of being deeply embarrassed, and even though at a purely personal level, I am not rendering judgment on another human being, as a leader of the government trying to uphold the rule of law, I have no choice except to move forward and say that you cannot accept … perjury in your highest officials.”Widely considered a mastermind of the Republican revolution that swept Congress in the 1994 elections, Mr. Gingrich remains wildly popular among many conservatives. He has repeatedly placed near the top of Republican presidential polls recently, even though he has not formed a campaign.Mr. Gingrich has said he is waiting to see how the Republican field shapes up before deciding in the fall whether to run.Reports of extramarital affairs have dogged him for years as a result of two messy divorces, but he has refused to discuss them publicly.Mr. Gingrich, who frequently campaigned on family values issues, divorced his second wife, Marianne, in 2000 after his attorneys acknowledged Mr. Gingrich’s relationship with his current wife, Callista Bisek, a former congressional aide more than 20 years younger than he is.His first marriage, to his former high school geometry teacher, Jackie Battley, ended in divorce in 1981. Although Mr. Gingrich has said he doesn’t remember it, Ms. Battley has said Mr. Gingrich discussed divorce terms with her while she was recuperating in the hospital from cancer surgery.Mr. Gingrich married Marianne months after the divorce.“There were times when I was praying and when I felt I was doing things that were wrong. But I was still doing them,” he said in the interview. “I look back on those as periods of weakness and periods that I’m … not proud of.”

Gingrich Acknowledges Affair But Says He’s Not a Hypocrite

Gingrich Acknowledges Affair But Says He’s Not a Hypocrite

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