Legality of PAC

Anti-'oligarch' Gingrich questions legality of Jeb super PAC 

By Glenn Thrush

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says he’s frightened by the prospect of his party’s top candidates – from Jeb Bush to Scott Walker to Marco Rubio — appearing on bended knee before “oligarchs” like the Kock Brothers.

He also expressed concern that Bush’ unique campaign structure – his Florida-based campaign is supposed to operate independently from a powerful $100-billion Bush-backing super PAC on the West Coast – was “implausible” and could run afoul of federal campaign laws.

“I don't quite know how you legally do that, frankly. I mean, it strikes me that it's, you know, stretching the game,” said Gingrich, 72, who said he would have considered another run at the White House if he thought he could raise enough money.

Gingrich, speaking on my POLITICO podcast earlier this summer, a few weeks before the August Kock confab in California, says he favors a system with virtually no government controls on political fundraising – apart from the blanket requirement that candidates report their haul “nightly” on the Internet.

He bristled when asked about the series of cattle-call auditions staged by super PAC donors for presidential candidates.

“I think it's very frightening. I don't think the Founding Fathers intended for the U.S. to be an oligarchy,” said Gingrich – himself the recipient of an estimated $20 million contribution from billionaire Sheldon Adelson and his wife in 2012.

“You begin to have billionaires who get together, who think that they have somehow got the divine right to tell the country what the country ought to be, which is, I think, dangerous.”

When I asked if he was talking about the Kock Brothers – who have pledged as much as $889 million to conservative causes in the 2016 cycle — he said, “yes.” But also widened his criticism to include unions, Democratic donors like George Soros and former New York Mayor Micheal Bloomberg, whom he accused of “buying” three elections with his multi-billion fortune.

“I think it's dangerous to have the party and the candidates shrink and independent oligarchs rise. I just think it's a very dangerous pattern,” said the former Georgia congressman, who briefly upended the 2012 Republican primary with a stunning win in South Carolina.

Gingrich had kind words for Donald Trump – “bombastic populist and aggressive,” he called him – but offered a more clinical assessment of Jeb Bush’s race thus far, especially Bush’s early decision to prioritize fundraising over retail politicking.

But the politicos he seemed most eager to talk about, not surprisingly, were the Clintons.

“[S]he runs a bad campaign and she's a bad candidate,” Gingrich said. “She can't dance. Bill can dance. Bill is Fred Astaire.  She ain't Ginger Rogers, to use a very dated analogy for people who watch, you know, American Movie Channel or TNT movies or something.”