Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, responding to reports that Bill Clinton had been using taxpayer's money to subsidize the Clinton Foundation's staff and to help pay to set up wife Hillary's private email server, said the former president and the current Democratic nominee are "grifters."
"The only way to describe them is they're grifters," Gingrich, a Trump surrogate and adviser, told Fox News' "Fox & Friends" program.
"These are people that show up at movies who lie to everybody, steal from everybody. If you think of them as grifters you sort of get it."
According to a Politico report, Bill Clinton funded his endeavors through a federal government program enacted in 1958 to keep past commanders in chief from going broke.
"Here was a pot of money, why not take it?" said Gingrich. "Well, it's illegal, well, 'if they do notice we'll get lawyers and we'll lie about it.'"
The Clintons would be "ostracized" if they were in a "normal, healthy society," said Gingrich.
"They would be ostracized for being such unpatriotic scammers who go around using public trust and public money and then lying about it pathetically," he continued. "Instead we get numb to it. It's an astonishing thing to live through."
Meanwhile, GOP nominee Donald Trump, with his travels around the country and to Mexico, has had a week that shows he's "daring, he's aggressive," and people will need to decide if that's the future they want for their country, Gingrich said.
"He was very successful I think in immediately taking up the president of Mexico's offer, going down there and doing an event where he looked very presidential," Gingrich said. "His speech that night was pure Trumpism. But it clearly drove the elite media crazy."
Trump travels to Detroit this weekend to meet with members of the African-American community and to tour the city with Dr. Ben Carson, and Gingrich said he believes the New Yorker has decided he's going to continue to be very blunt and very direct.
"I think he's gambling, he's thoughtfully decided to gamble on people being sick of corruption and sick of dishonesty," said Gingrich.
Trump also discounted estimates that he can't win more than 10 percent of the nation's African-American vote, and praised him for his trips to the nation's inner cities in places like Chicago.
"Over 3,600 Americans have been killed in Chicago," said Gingrich, and liberal policies "have done nothing."
In Detroit, he continued, "the city collapsed. Large parts of the city are uninhabited. The school system is a disaster. People have no jobs, they have no hope, they have no future. All of this under Democrats."
Gingrich admitted that there are places where he and Trump "disagree deeply," but he admires him for having the courage to remind people about Abraham Lincoln, and to remind people about the "segregationist senators who were Democrats, and all the segregationist sheriffs were Democrats, and the Democrats have totally mismanaged the biggest cities."
And for Trump to visit hostile environments, "he's going to be attacked and get beaten up, but if he can endure it, by October you might see him in the 20, 25 percent range in the black community," said Gingrich. "It is impossible for a Democrat to win if they're driven below 80 percent of the black vote."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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