Exclusive: Newt Gingrich on the 2020 Election, the Georgia Runoffs, and the Communist China Threat

Today, we sit down with Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, to discuss the 2020 election, the Georgia Senate runoffs, and why America must not lose sight of its biggest threat—the Chinese Communist Party.

This is American Thought Leaders, and I’m Jan Jekielek.

Jan Jekielek: Newt Gingrich, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Newt Gingrich: It’s great to be with you. I’m sure it’ll be fascinating.

Mr. Jekielek: It absolutely will. You’re in the middle of a number of areas that are incredibly, incredibly important to me. From what I understand, even though you’re in Rome, as we speak, you’re actually working closely with a number of campaign related officials in Georgia. Can you give me an update? What’s going on in Georgia right now?

Mr. Gingrich: Well, I think that the Republicans have come to grips with some of the election irregularities. I think the Republican National Committee in particular, has done a very good job of bringing in experts and tightening up substantially over what was happening back in November. I think the campaigns are getting a grip also.

The gap between Senator Loeffler, for example, and Raphael Warnock is so enormous, that he’s probably the most radical candidate ever nominated by a major party for the U.S. Senate. So that’s beginning to sink in. For a long stretch, people weren’t aware of who he was.

As they learn how many different ways he’s radical, whether it’s his approval of Fidel Castro, or his support for abortion virtually under any circumstance, or his desire to eliminate bail so that people would be able to get out without having to post bail—every time you turn around there’s something new about him that just shows you how radical he is. I think that’s having an effect.

I think in the other race, Senator Perdue actually ran ahead of President Trump, and came very close to winning without a runoff. And I think that the challenge for Ossoff is that basically he is a San Francisco liberal. He raises twice as much money in California, as he raises in Georgia. And the last time he ran in the South’s special election, he raised some amazingly … 90 per cent of his money, and the last ones of that campaign were from out of state. So you know, he can run a big campaign, just can’t get any votes.

And my guess is that Ossoff will, in fact, end up losing. He’s also got a problem because he’s tied to Warnock, since they’re both on the ballot at the same time. So he can’t quite get away from Warnock’s radicalism. And he knows if he tried to, it would hurt him both in the African American community and it will hurt him with the left wing of his party. So he’s kind of trapped to being more explicitly openly radical than he would be if he was running just by himself.

Mr. Jekielek: So Newt, this video that came out some time ago, that still hasn’t actually fully been accounted for, as far as I can tell, are looking like ballots were being run through machines. This came out of Georgia, this came out of Atlanta. There’s a couple of things I want to address related to that. But for starters, there is a lot of disquiet; many, especially I think Republican voters, are very concerned that the electoral system is somehow compromised. And of course, this video is perhaps emblematic of that.

And I’ve certainly heard this—that there’s even some kind of a despondency among some of these voters. The question is, how much can this affect this election? Can people feel that it’s actually going to be a secure election? And in general, what are  your thoughts around this whole situation?

Mr. Gingrich: Well, I think that the reality is that—and I still say this all the time—if you’re a conservative, you have to vote. Because our job is to … we need to win by a bigger margin than the left can steal. So we need to get every single conservative out.

Because these two run-offs are probably the most important run-offs in American history. They have the potential to change the whole direction of the country. Because if we win, Biden would have to be much more moderate. And if they can elect Ossoff and Warnock, Biden will have a signal, he will be very radical. So I think this is a huge decision point for the country.

The challenge in Georgia … I personally have no doubt that Trump won more votes than Biden did. And that the difference basically was theft. They just had a report yesterday, for example, that there were drop boxes that were supposed to be taken directly to the election center, one of which was gone for like 17 hours. And then most of them did not come anywhere close to going straight to the center.

As you pointed out, you have this video that’s amazing, that’s a security camera that shows them telling everybody to go home. And then the four people who are left, after everybody else has left, they start pulling out suitcases of ballots.

And it’s amazing the percentage that Biden got that night, between 10pm and about 2am in the morning. And I’ve not seen any persuasive argument … in fact, Molly Hemingway wrote a devastating piece in the Federalist, where she very clearly says all the defenses of this are crazy, that the fact is, these people were engaged in illegal activities.

So I think there’s good reason for people to be concerned. I think we need an honest election movement to really tighten up on things. The very idea that we use voting machines which send data through Barcelona to Frankfurt is crazy. In an age when we know how sophisticated hacking is, I wouldn’t trust any of these machines anymore.

So I think you’re going to see a real effort over the next few years to dramatically reform the election process to get back to honest elections.

Mr. Jekielek: When you just described this problematic situation that could have happened in Georgia, that you’re describing; now how can the typical voter [who’s] thinking “hey, if the same thing is just going to happen on January 5 …”—how are we going to change this?

Mr. Gingrich: Well, I think in terms of just between now and January 5, the Republican National Committee is monitoring all of the dropboxes. All of them have 24 hour security camera coverage; I suspect that we will have people … we’ve asked to be able to come in and watch the county clerks as they send ballots out. And I think you’ll just see a much tighter process of one; turning out our vote with a much bigger turn out—the vote effort, and two; making it much, much harder to steal.

Now in the long run, we need to abolish the dropboxes, which make no sense at all. In Georgia it is illegal to be harvesting votes, and that’s the primary purpose of the dropbox model.

And I think we have to change the absentee ballot law, so that we always know who each ballot can be connected back to. Because right now, you have 1,200,000 absentee ballots, and they’re basically just a big lump. Once they took the ballot and the envelope, they got rid of the envelope, and so you have no way of going back and having an honest recount, because you don’t know where the ballots came from.

Mr. Jekielek: So you’re saying that in this particular run-off, they’re not going to necessarily be able to do that this time?

Mr. Gingrich: Well, we think that we’re making it harder, that’s the way I would put it. I think that there will still be some cheating, but I think that the amount of time and effort being put into policing it is dramatically bigger than it was in November.

Mr. Jekielek: So I noticed that you retweeted a very interesting short summary document about how Article II of the Constitution and the 12th Amendment talks about how state legislators play a role in determining the electors. There’s a discussion about what these state legislators should do. Could you comment on this a little bit? And also, frankly, you’re a historian; this is something that not a lot of Americans are aware of at the moment—that the legislators play this foundational role in determining the electors and can make decisions about them.

Mr. Gingrich: If you go to the Constitution, there is a specific sentence which says, “The legislatures will decide the process of picking the electors.” It doesn’t say the secretary of state or the governor or the judges. It says the legislators.

And if you assume that there’s now a 5-4, or in some cases 6-3, majority of people who actually believe you should interpret the constitution as it’s written—it’s pretty hard to read that sentence and not believe that in a number of these states, for example, Georgia, the secretary of state made a series of agreements that change the election law without going through the legislature.

So you can begin to see that there’s a case here that those are unconstitutional actions that violate the very specific language. As I said, anybody who’s watching us can go pull up the Constitution, find the paragraph on elections, and you will find it says the state legislature will make these decisions. And I think that was quite deliberate.

You could imagine the legislature intervening and saying, we’re going to allocate our electors not on winner take all, but based on proportionality, in which case Trump would get 49 per cent of the Georgia electors and Biden would get 51 per cent. We’ve never been in this kind of a mess and seen this kind of a really widespread effort—at least not in modern times, you’d have to go back to the 19th century to see this kind of dishonesty.

Mr. Jekielek: So there is a historical precedent you’re saying for the legislatures to do something differently than business as usual.

Mr. Gingrich: Sure. I mean, in theory, legislators could step in and change all sorts of things if they wanted to. Now, getting it done and, in some states, having to override the governor’s veto, there’s a lot of different pieces to this. But I think there’s no question that based on a reasonable interpretation of the law—in Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, you clearly had the law being broken. I don’t think there’s any doubt about it.

I don’t know about Arizona, because we have not been able to get a recount of Maricopa County, which is Phoenix. But I think they may be getting that and well, then we’ll see.

In a number of these places you have people say, “Look, you had 2200 dead people voting”, because they run the rolls and they find out that a number of these people show up on the social security end-of-life list, and they’re still voting. There’s a lot of that kind of stuff. People would be surprised by how many votes Biden probably got from people who were already dead.

Mr. Jekielek: The other big question is, it has to be larger? This is what people are saying. It has to be larger than the margin that one candidate won. How important is that?

Mr. Gingrich: I think that’s reasonable, because otherwise, it only has meaning if it can, in fact, change the outcome. And so that’s part of why they, particularly in Michigan, were having a hard time. But I think the number of mistakes, factual falsehoods—whatever you want to call them—occurring in most of these states are larger than the margin by which Biden carried the state. So I think in that sense, it’s easier to prove than people might think.

Mr. Jekielek: So, as of December 8, you’re probably aware that YouTube has issued a statement that it plans to remove videos that, in different ways, challenge the so-called official outcome. This is a [YouTube] statement under a video that NTD had published. “U.S. elections—As of December 8, states have certified presidential election results, with Joe Biden as the president-elect. States certify results after ensuring ballots are properly counted and correcting irregularities and errors. Learn more.”

That’s the official [Youtube] statement below a video about election anomalies and so forth that was published on an NTD channel. What are your thoughts?

Mr. Gingrich: Well, I think what you have is the classic case of an establishment which believes that it has the right to censor and control the people of the United States. I just did a podcast at “Newt’s World” on the Declaration of Independence. And if you go back and you look at the Declaration of Independence, and you look at the Bill of Rights, we’ve been going through a cycle right now, whether it is dictatorial governors or dictatorial mayors, or it is dictatorial internet companies—these are direct violations of the American system.

I think, frankly, that the big internet companies are begging to be broken up. I think it is outrageous that sitting there in a left wing enclave around San Francisco, these freaks are all talking to themselves, and they’ve decided they have the right to tell the rest of the country what you can and cannot think, and that they’re prepared to censor you if you think the wrong thoughts. That is the absolute opposite of the American system. And I think that ultimately will lead to enormous anger on the part of the American people.

Mr. Jekielek: I want to talk more about this censorship. But I want to ask, is it accurate to say, “As of December 8, states have certified presidential election results, with Joe Biden as president-elect”? It just doesn’t seem to me like that’s the case. Is that accurate?

Mr. Gingrich: Well, no. They’ve certified, which is the beginning of then going to court. In a lot of these places—you see this in some House races—in order to go to court, you have to have a certified outcome. That means if you think you’ve got a case, the certification begins the dance—it doesn’t end the dance.

But remember, the news media spent five years hating Donald Trump—they are desperate to defeat Trump. In this case, I count the big internet companies as part of the news media; they’re desperate to defeat Trump, they will protect Biden as much as they can, and they will hide from the public anything which would either hurt Biden or help Trump. That’s what you’re caught up in right now. That doesn’t mean legally that what they’re saying is true. It doesn’t mean that legally, the president doesn’t have the right to contest.

I mean, Gore versus Bush went all the way into January. And so I don’t think you can assume anything at the moment. If the court comes back and orders a thorough recounting, for example, or if the court comes back and says that these states have an indeterminate outcome—because you can’t really be sure who won—you’re going to be in a very different world.

Mr. Jekielek: Do you think it’s actually possible that there might be some redos of elections in states?

Mr. Gingrich: I don’t know how they would do that. The Constitution … and this is something I first encountered this fall, as I had done several podcasts on stealing the election. Before the election, I’d covered Nancy Pelosi’s H.R. 1, a bill she introduced which was a blueprint for how to steal elections. Kim Strassel at the Wall Street Journal wrote a brilliant column pointing out that they’ve been out trying by lawsuits and other devices to basically implement the Pelosi model for how to steal an election.

So I’ve been talking about this and writing about this for a very long time. And I think that, in my mind, there’s no question that we are at an enormously important crossroads as a country. It’s very frustrating—to go back to the example you brought up earlier—to have a security camera show you a video which seems so clear a case of theft, and then have every major media try to avoid covering it. To me it is a betrayal of the country by elite interest groups and these billionaires in Silicon Valley that I wouldn’t have thought possible 10 years ago.

Mr. Jekielek: I want to talk a little bit about this general realm a little further. You’re focusing a lot on the election lately, but you have also been focusing on China recently. In fact, the interview we did earlier was about your book, “Trump versus China: Facing America’s Greatest Threat,” which by the way, I’m going to recommend to everyone. It’s an incredible tome of a lot of incredibly valuable information that, frankly, a lot of Americans don’t know.

We saw about two months ago this incredible suppression. It’s interesting that you’re connecting the corporate media and the internet companies of this Hunter Biden laptop story.

Mr. Gingrich: Sure.

Mr. Jekielek: We saw that. There’s even been studies that have been done by MRC [Media Research Center] that showed that itself could have shifted the election.

Mr. Gingrich: And now you have Swalwell, a Democrat serving on the Intelligence Committee, who we’re learning had a relationship with a Chinese professional spy. We know that Dianne Feinstein, when she was chair of the Intelligence Committee for something like 14 years, had a Chinese spy as her driver in San Francisco. I know Ron Johnson, the Senator from Wisconsin, did everything he could to get this out in the open.

There is zero doubt that Hunter Biden is a crook. And there’s zero doubt that Hunter Biden’s father had to know what he was doing, because it involves too much money. I was very discouraged to see the Attorney General say that he deliberately sat on it for the pre-election period. You have to wonder, what was he doing? Why shouldn’t the American people have had the right to know this.?

And I worry that what you’re seeing starting to get set up, is an effort which will ultimately lead to Biden’s removal, and Kamala Harris ending up as president.

Because you can just see, just watch the way the liberal media … take what they’re doing right now with Feinstein and the idea that she’s maybe too old. And there have been three or four articles now about what they should do about her. Because there is no way to get her out of the Senate, except by a very hard process that wouldn’t happen. So she’s sitting there, but people are saying, you know, she’s really not up to it. There were some very nasty articles about that in the last three or four days.

Then you’ve got, all of a sudden, Swalwell and the whole thing about the Chinese. And now you’ve got information beginning to come out about Hunter.

I can imagine a 2, 3, 4 month period when all of a sudden, you know, “it’s really sad that Biden has to leave office, but after all there’s just too much evidence, so we can’t let him stay”. That would make the left ecstatic, if they could swap out Biden for Kamala Harris. And I think the very fact that, all of a sudden, you’re going to see people start to write about Hunter Biden—all of a sudden it’s going to become fair game, the very people who refused to cover it for a year are suddenly going to be horrified—I’m very suspicious of how this is all being manipulated.

Mr. Jekielek: This is incredible. What you’re describing almost sounds like some kind of coordinated campaign.

Mr. Gingrich: Well, I don’t know how well they coordinate, but there’s no question that they have patterns, that something will suddenly become appropriate, and it becomes a topic that just sweeps through the news media, sweeps through the Georgetown social set, and sweeps through the Acela train going to and from New York and Washington. All of a sudden, it’s the new thing. You saw it for a while with Black Lives Matter. You saw it a couple years ago, with the whole question about—had anybody ever harassed anyone?

And you’ll get these waves. There’s a terrific book called “The Madness of Crowds,” which is a really interesting study of this kind of behavior, and it makes, in part, the argument that the very rhythm of social media increases the likelihood of this kind of crowd behavior.

Mr. Jekielek: That’s absolutely fascinating. Speaking of China as well, I think you actually looked at this a little bit, there’s this whole expose by Di Dongsheng, Vice Dean of the School of International Relations at Renmin University in China, which is a university that produces a lot of Communist Party cadres. It’s an elite Communist Party school. And he’s talking about how traditionally they had this great friendship with the American elites, and everything was going well until Trump. This is November 28, I think, that he’s talking about this. What do you make of this?

Mr. Gingrich: I’m actually doing a lot of writing about it, and a lot of posting about it, because it’s available. There is an English language translation. So people have this opportunity, and you can watch the video. He’s talking to the equivalent of a graduate school. He’s saying, “Let me share with you how this really works. We have friends very high up in Washington. Everything was going great. And then Trump came in and screwed it up. And now we’re going to have friends very high up again.”

Well, who do we think he’s talking about? He’s talking about the Obama team. He’s talking about Joe Biden. He’s talking about Hunter Biden. He is describing a process by which the American elites—the people like Bloomberg, and the people at Apple and at Amazon—they have made so much money out of China, that they have no willingness to fight.

In fact, several of the biggest companies are actively lobbying against a bill that would block products created by slave labor from being imported into the United States. This is people like Nike. You have to say to yourself, how can Apple, the highest capitalized company in the world, have lobbyists working against a bill that is against slave labor? But they do. And I think it’s because they’ve had this deal with the Chinese where none of our elites care about tyranny in China, as long as you make enough money. That’s where we are.

Mr. Jekielek: So Newt, the bottom line here, January 20 is approaching, which means that, from everything I understand, someone’s going to be sworn in as president at that time. At this point, we just don’t know who that’s going to be. What do you expect is going to happen between now and then?

Mr. Gingrich: Well, I think it comes down to a series of court cases, and a series of state legislatures, and as the evidence keeps piling up … somebody said to me yesterday, if you have 1000 or 1500 people signing affidavits which are felonies … I mean “you said this happened, and if you’re lying, you can go to jail”. So the elite are saying, all of these people over here are lying to you. But these people are saying, “Wait a second, I’m risking going to jail. Why will you not believe me?”

And I think this dance hasn’t finished yet. As a practical matter, you’d have to say the odds are very high that—because of the news media suppression, and because of the internet suppression—Biden will end up as president. But they’re not 100 per cent yet. And Trump has every legitimate right to exercise all of his legal options, before we get to that point.

And the last point really is the vote in the Capitol in January. I also know that if Trump does end up concluding that it was stolen, he will probably spend four years running and be like Andrew Jackson was against John Quincy Adams, in 1824 to 1828. That will make Biden’s challenge of trying to govern very difficult, I think.

So we’ll see. As a citizen, I’m worried. As a historian, I’m fascinated. The book writing side of me thinks there will be really interesting books coming out of all this, because this is so amazing.

The biggest worry I have is that while we’re screwed up and we’re looking at ourselves and we’re fighting ourselves, the Chinese are just going to get steadily stronger. We are in a mortal competition with a totalitarian state, which is methodically seeking to dominate us and ultimately dominate the world. It’s very hard to pay attention to that when you have this much turmoil in your own country.

Mr. Jekielek: Any final thoughts on the Georgia Senate race?

Mr. Gingrich: If you care about the future of the country, make sure every person you know votes—it’s very straightforward—anybody you have on your email list, anybody you send Christmas cards to, any relatives you can telephone. This is all going to be about turning out the vote. If we turn out our vote, we will win, because we can turn out probably more than they can steal. But if we don’t turn out our vote, we’ll lose. And the difference in America—if Biden does end up as president, if he has Mitch McConnell to deal with as Majority Leader versus having Schumer to deal with—that difference is unbelievably big.

Mr. Jekielek: Newt Gingrich, it’s such a pleasure to have you on again.

Mr. Gingrich: Thank you. It’s good to be with you.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.