REMEMBER THIS NEWT WHOPPER AT THE CNBC DEBATE?

Newt was asked if he acted on behalf of Freddie Mac:

HARWOOD: Since -- since you mentioned Fannie and Freddie, Speaker Gingrich, 30 seconds to you, your firm was paid $300,000 by Freddie Mac in 2006. What did you do for that money?

GINGRICH: Were you asking me?

HARWOOD: Yes.

GINGRICH: I offer them advice on precisely what they didn't do.

(LAUGHTER)

Look -- look, this is not -- this is not...

HARWOOD: Were you not trying to help Freddie Mac fend off the effort by the Bush administration...

(CROSSTALK)

GINGRICH: No. No, I do -- I have never...

HARWOOD: ... and the -- to curb Freddie Mac.

GINGRICH: I have -- I assume I get a second question. I have never done any lobbying. Every contract was written during the period when I was out of the office, specifically said I would do no lobbying, and I offered advice.

And my advice as a historian, when they walked in and said to me, "We are now making loans to people who have no credit history and have no record of paying back anything, but that's what the government wants us to do," as I said to them at the time, this is a bubble. This is insane. This is impossible.

GINGRICH: It turned out, unfortunately, I was right and the people who were doing exactly what Congresswoman Bachmann talked about were wrong. And I think it's a good case for breaking up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and getting much smaller institutions back into the private sector to be competitive and to be responsible for their behavior.

This alone should have alerted all the fact checkers but only Bloomberg seems to have caught this huge lie:

Gingrich Said to Be Paid By Freddie Mac to Court Republicans
By Clea Benson and Kristin Jensen - Nov 15, 2011 10:39 AM MT
BLOOMBERG NEWS

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said during a Nov. 9 debate that he earned a $300,000 fee to advise Freddie Mac as a “historian” who warned that the mortgage company’s business model was “insane.”

Former Freddie Mac officials familiar with the consulting work Gingrich was hired to perform for the company in 2006 tell a different story. They say the former House speaker was asked to build bridges to Capitol Hill Republicans and develop an argument on behalf of the company’s public-private structure that would resonate with conservatives seeking to dismantle it.

Although Freddie Mac had developed strong supporters in the Democratic caucus, the firm started a new campaign to win over allies in Republican circles. Hollis McLoughlin, a former Treasury Department chief of staff in President George H.W. Bush’s administration, was brought in to head the effort.


McLoughlin hired Gingrich and several other Republicans, including former Representative Vin Weber and political message expert Frank Luntz, to assist the cause.

None of the former Freddie Mac officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said Gingrich raised the issue of the housing bubble or was critical of Freddie Mac’s business model.

Right now, only POLITICO has helped spread the word about the latest Gingrich scandal.