Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker who championed Bill Clinton's impeachment in 1998, now says the whole effort was a miscalculation. In a new episode of the New York Post's "Pod Force One" podcast, the Georgia Republican told columnist Miranda Devine that allowing the impeachment fight to become a story about sex, rather than a story about a president committing a felony, doomed the process from the start.
"I think it was a mistake because the real problem wasn't Lewinsky," Gingrich said.
The admission is striking, not because Gingrich is wrong about the underlying facts, but because he is right, and because the lesson he draws from the Clinton saga still applies to how Washington handles accountability today. The 42nd president lied under oath in a sexual harassment lawsuit. He was held in civil contempt. He lost his law license in Arkansas for five years. He was stripped of the right to argue before the Supreme Court. And yet he left office more popular than ever, while Gingrich himself was forced out of the speakership weeks before the Senate voted to acquit.
That sequence of events tells you everything about how the political class escapes consequences when the public conversation shifts from substance to spectacle.
Gingrich's central argument on the podcast is that the real offense was never the affair with Monica Lewinsky. It was that Clinton committed perjury during a deposition in the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit, a case filed by a former Arkansas state employee who accused Clinton of misconduct while he was governor.
When Jones's attorneys deposed Clinton, they asked about his relationship with Lewinsky. Clinton denied it under oath. Independent Counsel Ken Starr, originally appointed by Attorney General Janet Reno in 1994 to investigate the Whitewater real estate matter, expanded his probe to include the Jones lawsuit. The Starr Report concluded that Clinton had lied under oath, and House Republicans moved to impeach on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in late 1998.
Clinton became only the second president in American history to face impeachment proceedings.
But as Gingrich now concedes, the public never processed the case that way. The story became about sex, not about whether a sitting president could commit felonies and walk away clean. Gingrich told Devine:
"I always argued the question, 'Is he allowed to commit felonies?' But by allowing, and this is partly the way the report was written, by allowing it to be about sex, it trivialized it."
That trivialization had real consequences. Clinton used what Gingrich described as his "sharp legal mind" to muddy the waters, quibbling over the definition of the word "is" and fussing over semantics about sex. The strategy worked. The Senate acquitted him. And the man who led the charge paid the higher political price.
Gingrich pinpointed the moment he realized the effort was failing. He was sitting in the OK Cafe in Atlanta with his two daughters, both in their early twenties at the time. Their message was blunt.
"If our friends lose money on their 401(k) because of some stupid intern, we are going to be mad at you."
Gingrich said the exchange forced him to confront a cultural shift he had completely misread. The economy was strong. Americans were watching their retirement accounts grow. The public had no appetite for a constitutional crisis rooted in a scandal they viewed as personal, not criminal.
"And I realized at that point I had completely misunderstood how the culture was evolving," he said.
The admission is candid, and it carries a warning that conservatives should take seriously. When accountability fights are waged on terrain the public does not care about, the enforcers lose, even when the underlying offense is real. The question of how to hold powerful officials accountable without letting the process become a political sideshow remains as relevant today as it was in 1998.
Any honest accounting of the Clinton impeachment has to include the fact that Gingrich was not a clean messenger. During the very proceedings he championed, Gingrich was carrying on an affair with a woman two decades younger than him. That fact, combined with a rare midterm election loss for Republicans and an ethics controversy, led to his ouster from the speakership just weeks before the Senate trial.
Gingrich does not dwell on this in the podcast interview, but it hangs over his reflections. The GOP's credibility on the moral dimension of the case was already shaky. When the framing collapsed into a debate about sexual behavior rather than perjury, Republicans had no ground to stand on, and their own leader's conduct made the hypocrisy charge stick.
Washington has a long history of political figures whose personal contradictions undermine their public stands. That pattern has not changed. High-profile figures who shift positions or carry complicated records still face the same credibility tests Gingrich failed in 1998.
The post-impeachment record is worth reviewing in full, because it shows how selectively the system punishes misconduct. After leaving office, Clinton was stripped of his Arkansas law license. He could not practice law for five years. A judge held him in civil contempt for misleading testimony in the Jones case. He lost the privilege of arguing before the Supreme Court.
Those are real penalties. But they arrived quietly, after the political theater had ended and the cameras had moved on. In the arena that mattered most, public opinion, Clinton won decisively. Gingrich acknowledged as much on the podcast.
"[Clinton] actually left office at the high point of his popularity."
Gingrich went further, arguing that Clinton's popularity was so durable it could have carried Al Gore to the White House in 2000. Gore, Gingrich said, was "frankly, not popular enough to be a step away from Clinton." But the vice president, apparently offended by the scandal, chose to distance himself from the outgoing president rather than campaign alongside him.
"If Gore had understood that and had campaigned more with him, he might have beaten George W. [Bush]," Gingrich said.
It is a remarkable concession from the man who tried to bring Clinton down: that the impeachment not only failed to damage Clinton but may have indirectly helped elect a Republican president by driving Gore away from his greatest political asset.
Gingrich's retrospective is not just a history lesson. The tension between legitimate accountability and political overreach is a live issue in Washington right now. Congressional debates over impeachment, oversight, and the handling of sensitive investigations, including recent bipartisan impeachment efforts aimed at sitting officials, echo the same dynamics Gingrich describes.
The pattern repeats: a real offense gets buried under political noise, the public tunes out, and the official under scrutiny survives while the enforcers pay the price. The mechanism is not complicated. When the framing is wrong, the facts do not matter. When the messenger is compromised, the message does not land.
Gingrich learned that the hard way. He lost his speakership. His party lost seats in a midterm year when the opposing president was under impeachment, a result that should have been nearly impossible. And Clinton walked out of the White House more popular than the day he walked in.
The conservative movement has spent a quarter century debating whether the Clinton impeachment was a principled stand or a strategic blunder. Gingrich has now weighed in on the side of blunder, at least in execution. His argument is not that Clinton was innocent. It is that Republicans let the fight become about the wrong thing, and that the culture had moved past them before they realized it.
That kind of miscalculation is not unique to the 1990s. Political figures across the spectrum still misjudge public priorities, overestimate their own credibility, and pursue fights on terrain that favors their opponents. Dramatic political departures and reversals remain a fixture of American public life precisely because the gap between institutional ambition and public sentiment never fully closes.
What makes Gingrich's admission useful is its specificity. He does not say Clinton was wrongly accused. He does not say perjury should be tolerated. He says the process was botched, that the Starr Report's structure invited a sex-scandal narrative, that Republicans failed to keep the focus on felony conduct, and that the cultural moment made the whole enterprise look petty to a public watching its 401(k) balances climb.
Those are tactical observations, not moral surrenders. And they are observations the right should internalize. Accountability works only when the case is clear, the messenger is credible, and the public understands what is actually at stake. Miss any one of those, and the target walks free while the prosecutor takes the fall.
Clinton committed perjury in a sexual harassment case. He was punished, quietly, after the fact, in forums nobody watched. The man who tried to hold him accountable in the forum that mattered most just told the world it was a mistake. Not because Clinton was innocent, but because Washington made it easy for him to look like the victim.
That is not a story about the 1990s. That is a story about how power protects itself, and how the people who try to check it had better get the framing right, or they will be the ones who pay.
