Newt Gingrich Leaves 30-Year Trail Of Debts, Lawsuits And Bankruptcies In His Wake #p2 #tcot

"WASHINGTON -- Newt Gingrich holds himself up as a model of fiscal discipline. "If the U.S. government was as debt-free as I am, everybody in America would be celebrating," he told reporters last year.

What may be true for Gingrich personally, however, has rarely been the case for organizations he runs. Gingrich's presidential campaign is basically broke. The latest financial disclosure reports show that his campaign closed out the month of January with $1.73 million in debt and a scant $1.79 million in cash on hand, just enough to cover expenses that included private jets and unusually large personal reimbursements. The highly publicized injection of more than $11 million from casino magnate Sheldon Adelson into a super PAC backing Gingrich's campaign has fueled the perception that Gingrich is flush, but Adelson's money won't keep the lights on at campaign headquarters.

Instead of withdrawing from the race, as candidates typically do when they run out of money, Gingrich has barreled ahead. In the past month, he has hired additional staff, made costly trips to California and Arizona, and scheduled a week's worth of campaign appearances in Tennessee and his home state of Georgia ahead of the March 6 Super Tuesday primaries.

Gingrich, who did not respond to questions from The Huffington Post, is by no means the first presidential candidate to run up dangerously high debts on the campaign trail. Where the former House speaker is concerned, however, this combination of mounting bills, shrinking prospects and questionable expenses has three decades of precedent behind it.

Interviews with Gingrich's former colleagues and a review of thousands of official documents by The Huffington Post reveal a previously unexplored side of his career: a striking pattern of financial mismanagement at the political and nonprofit groups that Gingrich has created, steered and abandoned over the past 30 years. While the high-profile ethics investigations of the 1990s focused on the narrow legality of Gingrich's individual schemes, their disastrous record as a whole has been largely overlooked.

Since 1984, Gingrich has launched 12 politically oriented organizations and initiatives based in Washington. Of those, five have been investigated by the Internal Revenue Service and the House Ethics Committee, another five closed down with debts totaling more than $500,000, and two were subject to legal action."

rest http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/02/newt-gingrich-2012-nonprofits-debts-bankruptcies_n_1311858.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000009