President Barack Obama's take on the 1995 government shutdown is wrong, says someone who was involved in it: former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
"I'm always amazed by President Obama's misunderstanding or deliberate falsification of history," Gingrich, now a co-host of CNN's "Crossfire," told fellow CNN host Wolf Blitzer.
Obama said in his Tuesday news briefing that after the '95 shutdown, "the Republican Party and Mr. Gingrich realized this isn't a sensible way to do business, that we shouldn't engage in brinksmanship like this, and then they started having a serious conversation with President Clinton about a whole range of issues, and they got some things that they wanted."
The statement was one of at least three, Gingrich said, where Obama was "factually false."
"And since I was a witness, let me correct him," he said. "We had a very tough, but very consistent negotiation with President Clinton. Unlike President Obama, President Clinton kept talking."
Despite Democrats' claims that Republicans want to negotiate at the point of a gun, Gingrich said he noted in 1995 that the president has his own gun: the veto pen. That evened out negotiations, he said, because the House had to ability to refuse to pass spending bills.
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