Former House speaker Newt Gingrich says impeaching Bill Clinton over Monica Lewinsky scandal was 'a mistake'

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Newt Gingrich, who from 1995 to late 1998 served as the 50th Speaker of the House of Representatives, said in an interview this week that it "was a mistake to impeach" then-President Bill Clinton over his 1990s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. 

Gingrich, who represented Georgia's sixth congressional district in the House from 1979 until he left Congress in 1999, made the remarks on Pod Force One, a podcast hosted by New York Post columnist Miranda Devine. He led the effort to impeach Clinton over the scandal that erupted surrounding Clinton's sordid affair with Lewinsky. 

Responding to a question from Devine about whether it was a mistake to impeach Clinton in 1998, Gingrich said, "I think it was a mistake because the real problem wasn’t Lewinsky. The real problem was he had committed perjury in a case involving sexual harassment while he was governor,” Gingrich continued, referring to the Whitewater investigation that occurred years earlier and led investigators to question the president about sexual misconduct claims made by Paula Jones when Clinton was the governor of Arkansas.

“In fact, he was stripped of his law license in Arkansas after he left the presidency,"Gingrich pointed out, "and for five years couldn’t practice because he clearly committed a felony.”

Eventually, independent counsel Kenneth Starr questioned Clinton under oath about claims that he'd carried on an affair with Monica Lewinsky, who worked at the White House as an intern. Starr, in his final report, said Clinton had committed perjury and obstruction of justice with his denial of the affair, prompting House Republicans to launch impeachment proceedings, which culminated with Clinton's impeachment. Clinton was later acquitted by the Senate.

Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky pictured in the Oval Office in the mid-1990s.

Gingrich went on to say that the sex scandal aspect of the impeachment "trivialized" the case Republicans made at the time, and obscured the fact that Clinton had lied under oath. He also revealed that he eventually knew Clinton wouldn't be impeached based on his daughters' reactions to the impeachment efforts.

“I realized that we were really off course in August of that year, when I was at the OK Cafe in Atlanta with my two daughters, who at that time were, I guess, in their early 20s, and they both said to me, ‘If our friends lose money on their 401(k) because of some stupid intern, we are going to be mad at you,'" Gingrich said. “And I realized at that point I had completely misunderstood how the culture was evolving.”

Watch a clip from the Gingrich interview below and watch the full interview here.