Newt Gingrich, Confidence Man

Newt Gingrich is a confident man. It's a quality that serves him well in debates in Mitt Romney who often appears anything but confident when dealing with unscripted moments on the campaign trail or in front of debate audiences. And confidence matters in the demeanor and bearing of a nominee for public office, particularly for the office of President. Confidence is generally considered a good quality in a person. But sometimes confidence refers to another kind of confident man, and that kind accurately describes Newt Gingrich as well.

A "confidence man" in this sense is someone who takes advantage of human psychological characteristics like naivety, vanity, greed, dishonesty, compassion, or fear for personal gain, usually financial. It was coined by journalists in the 1840s during a high profile and widely reported story about William Thompson, a New York man so gifted with skills in rhetoric he could talk upper-class men out of their watches and cash with mere promises to return them. Today, confidence schemes are part of our daily culture, with Nigerian prince emails, time-share vacation "awards," and beautiful Russian women looking for love. It's a multi-billion per year industry with operators ranging from street-corner grifters playing 3-Card Monte to billionaire "investors" like Bernie Madoff. Newt Gingrich falls somewhere in between.

In 1995, Gingrich launched a children's reading charity called Earning-by-Learning which offered to pay $2 rewards to kids for every book they read. A Mother Jones story points out that Gingrich claimed the program overhead was "entirely voluntary," and "the only money goes to the kids." Nevertheless, as the investigation showed, the program paid its Atlanta volunteers $500 each and half of the Houston program's entire budget went to one salaried position. Gingrich also directed 90% of one full year's donations to former staffer Mel Steely who was writing a book about Gingrich and two professors evaluating the program. Despite raising tens of thousands of dollars from Gingrich's book tour and GOP donors, the program paid less than $10,000 to the kids themselves.

In the late 1990s, Gingrich and his second wife, Marianne, were the focus of an FBI criminal investigation into a $10 million kickback scheme between Sarkis Soghanalian, once the world’s largest private arms dealer, and the Speaker. According to reporting by The National Security News Service, associates of Newt Gingrich and his wife negotiated the eight-figure payment in exchange for Gingrich using his position as Speaker to get the Iraqi arms embargo lifted so Soghanalian could collect $54 million from Saddam Hussein's regime for weapons he sold Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. Just before a June 8, 1997 meeting scheduled directly between Marianne and Soghanalian, the FBI inextricably ordered the field office not to record that meeting or prevent it from happening. Agents involved in the case reported they were prevented by Washington officials from continuing with the case.

In 1997, Gingrich was fined $300,000 by the House Ethics Committee for violating federal rules regarding campaign financing and improper use of charitable organization funds related to his work as House Speaker--the first time in 208 years that the House had disciplined a speaker for ethical wrongdoing. In his report to the House Ethics Committee, special counsel James Cole wrote that Gingrich had "violated tax law and lied to the investigating panel" regarding charitable donations to shell organizations used to finance projects with a political intent.

Since his embarrassing resignation as House Speaker for that ethics violation, Gingrich has been busy trading on his name and former title to swindle business owners out of cash. As Rachel Maddow reported on MSNBC, Gingrich solicited $5,000 "donation" requests from businesses across the country in exchange for award certificates, a novelty gavel, and dinner with the former speaker at a large event honoring award recipients. The fake awards scam proved embarrassing to Gingrich when he sent one to The Lodge near Dallas, a popular strip club. When Gingrich was told the award went to a strip club, he chose to rescind the award and the dinner invitation.

Now, with Newt Gingrich's surprisingly strong victory over Mitt Romney in Saturday's South Carolina primary, the attention of voters in Florida will once again be focused on Gingrich's past and current controversies by the Romney campaign and the Super PACs that support him. Meanwhile, as recently as November of last year, his former scam machine fundraising company, American Solutions for Winning the Future, skipped out on $16,000 in past rent owed to B.G.W. Limited Partnerships in Washington D.C. for space rented in a K-street office building. Gingrich is attempting to distance himself from his past schemes by claiming as a convert to Catholicism he has repented and been absolved for his past and is now a good and honest public servant. And if you believe that, then he has an award he'd like to give you.