Gingrich Weighs in on Berger, Sept. 11 Report

This is a partial transcript from "The O'Reilly Factor," July 21, 2004 that has been edited for clarity.

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BILL O'REILLY, HOST: The 9/11 Commission (search) will make public its final report tomorrow. It's expected to say that both the Clinton and Bush administrations missed opportunities to neutralize bin Laden (search) and Al Qaeda.

Joining us now from Washington is Fox News analyst Newt Gingrich. Before we get to the commission, you want to weigh in on the Sandy Berger (search) deal, how you see it? You know him.

NEWT GINGRICH, FOX NEWS POLITICAL ANALYST: Yeah, I've known Sandy for a good while and we worked together when I was speaker and he was national security advisor. I'm really astonished that he would consider taking secret documents out of the National Archives, particularly because the Clinton administration already had the problem with CIA Director Deutsche, who had taken a computer home that had classified documents, which also broke the law.

And I can't quite imagine what Sandy thought he was doing. You know, they monitor the archives. They take secrecy very seriously. Now, what he did was a criminal offense. I'm very puzzled by why he did it.

O'REILLY: Yeah, his people are telling us anonymously, I can't use the name, but they're legitimate people — that he’s just disorganized, disheveled, throwing stuff in. And then, you know, our guy at the top of the show basically says that's a bunch of bunk. You know, I'd hate to put you on the spot, but do you think there's some more to this?

GINGRICH: Well, I think, first of all, that you have to ask yourself what documents was he taking and why was he taking them?

O'REILLY: Yeah, well, we've already identified — it was the post- millennium briefing on the guy who came down.

GINGRICH: And that's, apparently, very critical of the way the Clinton administration had organized the entire the intelligence activities. And so, I don't know whether he thought he was going to somehow block the commission from getting...

O'REILLY: ... it wasn't an original document. It was a copy.

GINGRICH: Well, that's why I say, though...

O'REILLY: It doesn't make any sense.

GINGRICH: You know, and it doesn't make sense to be told by a man who's that senior, you know, that he didn't recognize he was walking out with secret documents. And I'm told that there were two eyewitnesses that say, unequivocally, they were being deliberately taken.

O'REILLY: Yeah, well, I don't know about that, because if they were being deliberately taken and eyewitnesses saw it, they would have stopped it and security would have come in. You know how it works.

GINGRICH: Well, apparently, they tipped off the folks — apparently, that's what led to the ultimate FBI investigation.

O'REILLY: All right. Now, the 9/11 Commission tomorrow. We have the two commissioners on “The Factor” tomorrow night. We'll talk, of course, with them. But we know what it's going to say. It's going to say that on at least 12 occasions, the, you know, U.S. government could have gotten bin Laden if they wanted to, and they're going to divide the blame between Clinton and Bush. Do you think that's fair and does it serve any purpose?

GINGRICH: Well, I think it's fair. I met with the commission in private for several hours and I was very, very impressed by the seriousness of every single member of the commission. I thought that Governor Keene and Congressman Hamilton were doing a very good job of being bipartisan and I thought they were digging in a real kind of way.

I look forward to their report tomorrow. The pieces I know about so far I, frankly, mostly agree with. I think the forward-looking part's the more important, not just what do we learn about the past, but how do we change the future. And I know there are a couple issues that are hanging up in the air that they haven't quite decided, so I'm looking forward very much to see if they...

O'REILLY: Well, one of the recommendations is going to be put an overall terror czar, who, you know, is going to force these people to cooperate and everything's going to go through him. You favor that, right?

GINGRICH: Absolutely. I think the level of lack of communication within the FBI, and between the FBI and the intelligence community, was just a scandal waiting to blow up. You know, I think that it's very important to recognize that all through the '90s, every time there was a terrorist incident, the reaction was to deal with it as a crime problem rather than dealing with it as an intelligence problem and a war-making problem.

O'REILLY: Well, that'll never happen again, right? It's just a matter of whether you're going to have a guy who's going to be tough enough and strong enough to bring these people together and stop the rivalries that have plagued Washington ever since George Washington.

GINGRICH: And that's, very straightforward, going to require some significant budget authority and some significant promotional authority.

O'REILLY: Yeah, and a tough guy, a real tough guy.

GINGRICH: A tough guy, that's right.

O'REILLY: You know, not some bureaucratic game player who's trying to kiss the butt of whoever his boss is and that's what we've had. All right, let's get to the media. Go ahead, you know. I mean, it's getting worse, and worse and worse.

GINGRICH: You know, I startled people last week by saying I thought that I would not be at all surprised if the election turned out to be much wider than the media thinks it's going to be. And there's a terrific new book out by Samuel Huntington, a professor at Harvard, called "Who Are We," and it looks at America.

And Huntington's point is this country's about 80 percent committed to a broad set of values that have defined America for 300 years, but that the news media, the academic elite are clearly on the other side — and Hollywood — are the three big places that are on the other side of it.

And I think it's very interesting — the example I've been fascinated with is Ambassador Wilson, who apparently, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, clearly lied both about his wife's involvement in getting a job with the CIA, lied about what he had told the CIA, and then wrote the book called "The Politics of Truth."

And it's interesting to me that “The New York Times” and “The Washington Post” wrote all these editorials citing Ambassador Wilson as long as he was on their side. But I haven't seen a whole lot of evidence that they recanted their positions now that it turns out that he's a liar.

O'REILLY: But we can even make a more vivid portrayal of this. My column tomorrow, which will be posted on billoreilly.com is about four different investigations — well, three and one — the Lord Butler investigation in Britain, the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation, the 9/11 Commission, and Vladimir Putin all say intelligence was faulty, Blair and Bush didn't lie. All of them...

GINGRICH: Right.

O'REILLY: ... independently, OK, come to the same conclusion.

GINGRICH: Absolutely.

O'REILLY: How many times have you heard left-wingers accuse the Bush administration of lying? And yet, you never hear a word of, "Sorry, I was wrong."

We apologized with our weapons of mass destruction analysis right here, because we depended on the CIA, we were wrong. You're never going to hear "The New York Times" or "The L.A. Times" say, "We called them liars. They weren't liars. We're sorry." You're never going to hear it.

GINGRICH: Right. And I don't know what's happening at “The New York Times,” which has become dramatically worse in the last three or four years in terms of the systematic willingness, I think, to attack the president. I actually think some of the senior editors of “The New York Times” get up every morning, trying to figure out how to maximize pain in the Bush White House.

O'REILLY: Or Fox News Channel.

GINGRICH: Or Fox News... but in a way that makes no sense. I mean, this was, you know, once a great newspaper. And now, you get this unending, one-sided...

O'REILLY: Yeah, I call it a brochure for the far-left progressive movement. It's a brochure now for them. But see, there are powerful forces at work here. George Soros money has created a lot of smear Web sites on the left and we're in a cultural civil war, Mr. Speaker.

GINGRICH: We are, we are. And by the way, it's also interesting that Soros' money — Soros favors legalizing heroin — his money was used to found organizations who currently have hired convicted felons to go door to door recruiting voters for John Kerry and John Edwards, including, in Ohio, a convicted murderer, a convicted rapist, and in Missouri, seven people who list the jail as their home, because they're out of work release.

And by the way, they include five burglars who are both recruiting and casing simultaneously.

O'REILLY: OK, Mr. Speaker, thanks very much. We'll look into that. We appreciate it.

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