Mitt Romney may need to pay Newt Gingrich $1.6 million before this is all over.
Tuesday morning, the Romney campaign released an email ripping Gingrich for releasing just one year of his many as a consultant to Freddie Mac — work pretty much everyone other than Gingrich has characterized as lobbying. The slightly tongue-in-cheek email offered a $1.6 million “reward” (the amount of the Freddie contract) for the missing documents. On Laura Ingraham’s radio show Tuesday, Gingrich said he wasn’t aware any contracts were missing and said his firm, the Gingrich Group, will call on Freddie to release them.
“Presumably they do,” Gingrich told Ingraham when she asked if Freddie Mac has copies of the missing documents, “and I’m sure that we’ll ask them if they’ll release them because it’s the exact same contract.”
“I’m sure that they’ll go back and ask them for them,” Gingrich added. “Frankly I didn’t know until you just told me this, so I’ll go back and ask what the deal is.”
The back story on the missing contracts, from Bloomberg:
[Gingrich’s] first contract — spanning 1999 to 2002 and worth between $1 million and $1.2 million, according to two people familiar with the agreement — wasn’t released because officials at the Center for Health Transformation can’t find it, said Susan Meyers, a center spokeswoman who works for the Gingrich campaign. The 2006 contract also applied to 2007, she said, meaning the total value of that contract was $600,000. ‘We’re not even sure we signed anything for 2007,’ said Meyers.
This is the kind of thing gives competing campaigns a field day. And so Romney gleefully fired off his $1.6 million reward email. But if Gingrich follows through on his promised to get Freddie Mac to release their copies of the contracts, he may take some of Romney’s lobbying line of attack off the table.
