We all know Newt Gingrich is something of an expert on sex scandals. After all, he was in the middle of a six-year affair with Callista Bisek (who is not only now his wife but also Trump's Ambassador to the Vatican, no, really) while leading the impeachment of Bill Clinton.
Now serial adulterer Newt is worried about the innocents. That's what he told Sean Hannity.
"There’s a risk here that one allegation can destroy somebody and it’s not true or it’s far more nuanced than anybody wants to know,” Hannity replied. (Worried, Sean?)
“We’ve had a very long tradition in America going all the way back to the Boston Massacre in the 1770s that you were innocent until proven guilty and that you have the right of a presumption of innocence,” Gingrich said.
“And I think, again, if you have somebody like Harvey Weinstein, who now has so many names out there that it’s almost inconceivable that he isn’t guilty of a substantial amount of stuff."
He was dismissive of the women who came forth about long-ago incidents.
“How do you prove what really happened and how do you prove whether or not somebody really meant to do something negative?” Gingrich asked.
“And I do think we’ve got to take a deep breath here and not have the hysteria allow us to start destroying people randomly so that you then set up targets where anybody who wants to, can get even by suddenly remembering something that happened 20 years ago.”
(Except when it might give Republicans another Senate seat, right?)
Hannity said “politics” and timing make it complicated. Gingrich agreed but added that the “liberal news media” are also at fault for trying to “make a point.”
“Part of it is I think that you got to look at some of these things and ask yourself, ‘Why are they coming up now? What’s the evidence? And again, was it a situation that in fact was basically innocent, but is now subject to misinterpretation?’ When I see people who weren’t particularly offended 10 or 12 or 15 years ago but suddenly there is now this hysteria and so they decide they are going to join the lynch mob and they got their story to tell. I just think we as a country ought to take a deep breath and think carefully.”
“All of us want to protect the innocents,” he said.
But they may be "on both sides of that equation,” and it isn’t clear that “a charge is the same as a conviction.”
Isn't it special that these two have discovered the "innocent until proven guilty" clause. It's like The Republican National Convention of 2016 never happened.
