January 27th, 2012 | Trento's Take | Joseph Trento |
Newt Gingrich
(Photo credit: Gage Skidmore) On December 13 we posted a 6,400 word story about a FBI probe into Newt Gingrich when he was Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and his second wife, Marianne. It was a serious effort to report on a serious matter. My naïve hope was that my colleagues would follow our course and advance this story by expending more resources and pursuing the leads.
We had success getting a number of key people to go on the record and lay out the story. We got key FBI documents from a second Bureau source so we knew what we had was real. We tried to put a complex story into a coherent and verifiable narrative. We contacted three major news organizations about the story before it ran on our website. We offered each of the organizations contact information for our sources, the FBI documents and other information including taped interviews. All three news organizations said they would do the story – yet none of them did.
Continue reading The Gingrich FBI Investigation
Newt Gingrich and second wife Marianne Gingrich.
On October 5, Sarkis Soghanalian, once the world’s largest private arms dealer, died at 82. He had sold weapons to scores of dictators including Saddam Hussein, and he took many secrets with him to his grave. But one secret he did not take involves Newt Gingrich when he was Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. DCBureau has learned that Gingrich was at the center of a U.S. Justice Department criminal investigation in the late 1990s for a scheme to shake down the arms dealer for a $10 million bribe in exchange for Gingrich using his influence as Speaker to get the Iraq arms embargo lifted so Soghanalian could collect $54 million from Saddam Hussein’s regime for weapons he had delivered during the Iran-Iraq War.
Soghanalian was an FBI informant and was responsible for launching one of the most sensitive and secret investigations in FBI history involving the former Speaker and his second wife. According to Marianne Gingrich, it took the direct intervention of then FBI Director Louis J. Freeh to “get the investigation called off.” Continue reading Newt Gingrich, Marianne and the Arms Dealer:
A Buried FBI Investigation
October 13th, 2011 | Trento's Take | DC Bureau | In late summer 1995, a fax arrived at my office. The written invitation came by mail a week later. Sarkis Soghanalian, the international arms dealers, had been released from an American prison and had set up shop in Paris. He was hosting his coming out party. A larger than life character, he wanted the world to know he was back in business. He also wanted to thank his friends and family who had stood by him through that awful ordeal. I was included because I had kept in touch with him throughout his prison term, bringing journalists to interview him. I knew if the media was watching, the authorities would be less reticent to try something sinister. Continue reading The Death of The Merchant of War
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