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PDFFrom NYT:
Mr. Gingrich has faced many questions recently about the more than $1.6 million in consulting fees he got from Freddie Mac since leaving Congress in 1999. But part of the relationship started years earlier, as records and interviews show that Mr. Gingrich, as House leader in the 1990s, aligned himself with Freddie and Fannie on a number of key issues — defending them in Congress against political attacks, joining with them on housing projects and seeing top aides go work for them.
While Mr. Gingrich has minimized his past connections to the two closely related companies on the campaign trail, his Congressional record shows that his political and financial ties to the firms run deeper and farther back than he has acknowledged publicly and, in fact, set the stage for the lucrative consulting work that followed.
Mr. Gingrich, whose campaign declined to comment on his ties with Fannie and Freddie while in Congress, has been blistering in his recent criticism of the mortgage finance companies. He has blamed them in part for the 2008 housing collapse, said they should now be “broken up,” and in an October debate he declared that Representative Barney Frank should be “in jail” for associating with lobbyists close to Freddie.
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