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Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich has admitted to an
extramarital affair while leading the moral charge against
U.S. President Bill Clinton in 1998.
But the conservative Republican and possible 2008 presidential
contender said his affair was merely immoral while Clinton's
dalliance with intern Monica Lewinsky crossed into the criminal
arena when the president committed perjury.
In a telephone interview with Focus on the Family founder James
Dobson, Gingrich said his relentless pursuit of Clinton was
not "rendering judgment on another human being."
Instead, he said he was doing his job "as a leader of
the government trying to uphold the rule of law. You cannot
accept ... perjury in your highest officials."
The twice-divorced Gingrich, 63, was embraced by the Moral
Majority and positioned himself as a torchbearer for family
values in the mid to late 1990s.
His first wife claims he left her while she was fighting cancer
and during his second divorce in 2000, it was revealed Gingrich
had been seeing a congressional aide 20 years his junior,
who is now his third wife.
"
There are times that I have fallen short of my own standards," Gingrich
said in the interview streaming on the Focus on the Family
Web site. "There's certainly times when I've fallen short
of God's standards and my neighbor's standards."
Gingrich resigned from Congress in 1988 over alleged ethics
violations.
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