Countdown to Indictment

A MoJo Wire Timeline

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Well, we got what we wanted…sort of. Thanks in part to our Countdown to Indictment series, the House Ethics Committee has hired an outside counsel to investigate possible ethics violations by Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Throughout 1995, Mother Jones and the MoJo Wire worked in tandem to expose Newt’s questionable activities, wherever we might have found them: within his Political Action Committee, GOPAC; his televised college course, “Renewing American Civilization; his Progress & Freedom Foundation, and many other business dealings. When the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) was preparing to release thousands of GOPAC related-documents in December, the MoJo Wire was one of their research sources.

What we’ve done on this page is compile the articles and letters that were part of our Countdown to Indictment series. Some of the pages feature full-sized, scanned and readable correspondence between Gingrich and his cohorts, so you can make judgments for yourself. Oh, and just because we’re taking a moment to look back and reminisce on the past year, that doesn’t mean we’re resting on our laurels. In the future, we’ll be placing more documents online, including those submitted by the FEC.

As always, your comments are needed and appreciated. If you have something to say, please tell us.

  • Countdown to Indictment One
    In our May/June 1995 issue, editor-in-chief Jeffrey Klein exposed not only Gingrich’s questionable activities, but also a foot-dragging Democratic opposition research staff, a cabal of Republican lieutenants preparing for a Newt indictment, and Rush Limbaugh’s evasive, bullying maneuvering in the midst of ethical questions.

  • Countdown to Indictment Two: Will Newt Fall?
    By our July/August 1995 issue, we were able to state that Gingrich “has systematically built his empire through dubious transactions.” Glenn Simpson presented a detailed investigation of GOPAC, Gingrich’s college course at Kennesaw State College, his Progress & Freedom Foundation, as well as his haste in accomodating bills sponsored by Rep. Nancy Johnson (R-Conn.), who is also chairperson of the House Ethics Committee.

  • Coundown to Indictment Three: The Berman Letter
    $25,000 can go a long way, but can it help re-write policy? Glenn Simpson tracks down a letter and check sent to Gingrich by restaurant industry lobbyist Richard Berman, and discovers that soon after, Berman’s ideas were cropping up in Gingrich’s college course. You can see the full, scanned letter for yourself.

  • Countdown to Indictment Four: Newt Signs On
    Wherein Newt signs a copy of our magazine, and the press pleads ignorance of the whole GOPAC affair; take a peek at the number of GOPAC writeups in the press as they relate to the small-potatoes-in-comparison Whitewater affair.

  • Countdown to Indictment Five
    It’s the constant question in investigative journalism: who knew how much and when? In our November/December 1995 issue, we dug up correspondence between Gingrich, then-Tennessee governor Lamar Alexander and Alexander fundraiser Ted Welch. Gingrich brims with enthusiasm about GOPAC, but Alexander has a few reservations. The scanned documents included here tell the story.

  • Countdown to Indictment Six
    A MoJo Wire Exclusive: scanned copies of correspondence between Gingrich and Miller Nichols, a Kansas City-based real estate developer. Nichols gave GOPAC nearly $60,000 in funding; what did he want in return?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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