So much for Newt Gingrich and his daughter's claims that it was his first wife, Jackie that requested their divorce -- Newly recovered court files cast doubt on Gingrich version of first divorce:

Newt Gingrich claims that it was his first wife, not Gingrich himself, who wanted their divorce in 1980, but court documents obtained by CNN appear to show otherwise.

The Republican presidential candidate, now in his third marriage, has been peppered with attacks and questions about his divorce from Jackie Gingrich for the past three decades.

Questions about his past -- and what that past tells voters about his personal behavior -- have re-emerged as he has returned to the political scene 13 years after he resigned as speaker of the House.

A new defense that has arisen as Gingrich entered the presidential race this year is the insistence that she, not he, wanted the divorce. [...]

After initially being told that the divorce documents were sealed, CNN on Thursday obtained the folder containing the filings in the divorce, which had been stashed away for years in a Carroll County, Georgia, court clerk's drawer. Retired clerk Kenneth Skinner told CNN his deputy took Gingrich's file out of the public records room around 1994, "when he (Gingrich) became the center of attention," because Skinner feared tampering and theft.

"During these years, you had to make sure those papers were there," Skinner said. "People could go in those files and get things out. We didn't have enough security to control it." Read on...