Newt Gingrich: Hillary Would Be Indicted if She Was Anybody Else

If Hillary Clinton were any other public figure, she'd face indictment for her role in a foundation that was accepting multimillion dollar contributions from foreign governments, a fired-up former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Sunday.

"If this was any person but Hillary Clinton they'd be under indictment right now for a clearly straightforward problem." Gingrich said during a panel discussion on ABC's "This Week" program. "This isn't a political problem; this is a historic problem. The Constitution of the United States says you cannot take money from foreign governments without explicit permission of the Congress."

"It is clear and federal law," he continued. "I think there's a very simple case here. The Constitution says you can't take this stuff. We have federal laws that say you can't take that stuff.

Further, he insisted, "it's illegal and its dangerous to America to have foreign governments get in the habit of bribing people who happen to be the husband of the secretary of state or the next president of the United States."

Under the Constitution's "Emoluments Clause, which Clinton's opponents are using as ammunition in the donation scandal, persons holding public office are not to accept money from other countries without permission from Congress.

Gingrich said the founding fathers added that clause "because they knew the danger of corrupting our system by foreign money is enormous."

And in the case of Hillary and Bill Clinton and their family foundation, "you had a sitting secretary of state whose husband radically increased his speech fees," said Gingrich. "You have a whole series of dots on the wall now where people gave millions of dollars, [and] oh, by the way, they happen to have gotten taken care of by the State Department."

He believes a jury would look at the entire case and respond that "it's clearly against the Constitution and U.S. law," to take foreign donations.

Further, Gingrich pointed out, Clinton was "on the Watergate committee" and "she knew exactly what to do and eliminated 33,000 emails," referring to the former secretary of state's decision in March to turn over 30,490 emails from the private account she'd used while serving as secretary of state while deleting more than half the emails she either wrote or received from 2009 through 2013 after designating them as being personal.

"[Former President] Richard Nixon only erased 18 minutes," said Gingrich.

Related stories:

• Common Cause Urges Review of Clinton Foundation Donations
• State Dept. Award Winners Also Clinton Foundation Donors