Newt Gingrich paid over $1.6 million by Freddie Mac

Oops! That was a quick 15 minutes for the micro-resurgent Newt Gingrich. Articles far and wide across the Internet's tubes this morning are stating that Newt Gingrich was paid far more by Freddie Mac than the paltry $300,000 he was asked about during a recent debate. Rather, the crusty historian earned over $1.6 million from the troubled mortgage company.

According to Bloomberg news, to pick one source at random, from 1999 through 2002 the Newt earned a whopping $25-$30,000 per month retainer from Freddie Mac, in return for which he consulted with executives at Freddie Mac on a program to expand home ownership. One of Newt's suggestions was to educate Boy Scouts on the importance of maintaining good credit so that one day, God willing, they could file for personal bankruptcy when the next housing bubble explodes. Cheap advice at the price.

A 2^nd contract earned the perennial Washington insider $600,000 over a two-year period, during which Gingrich was intended to produce a white paper or some other document of some sort offering something in the general form of strategic advice. But the $600,000 apparently wasn't quite enough to force Newt to produce anything other than an endless supply of unrelated historical anecdotes, so no white paper was ever forthcoming.

According to Bloomberg news:

What he did for the money is a subject of disagreement. Gingrich said during the CNBC debate that he advised the troubled firm as a “historian.” Gingrich said he warned that the company’s business model was a “bubble” and its lending practices were “insane.” None of the former Freddie Mac officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said Gingrich raised the issue of the housing bubble or was critical of Freddie Mac’s business model.

(By comparison, $600,000 is almost enough to cover a line of credit at Tiffany's, just in case you might ever need to buy diamonds in the middle of the night and don't happen to have your wallet on you).

Bloomberg reports that Gingrich stayed on Freddie Mac's payroll until 2008, at which point, having bled them dry, he turned around and started griping about them instead.

Mr. Gingrich, your 15 minutes are up. Thanks for playing.