CHRIS WALLACE (HOST): Mr. Speaker, I want to give you a thought experiment. Assume that Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat, was the chairman of the committee and he raced to the White House to tell President Obama about some information he had gotten on Benghazi, let's say, before he told his committee. When you have been among the first people to cry foul on that?
NEWT GINGRICH: We would have been deeply shocked, horrified, and called for an independent commission.
WALLACE: Meaning, what? That this is just rounding up the usual suspects?
GINGRICH: Meaning he did his job as a partisan, and we would have done our job as a partisan.
BILL KRISTOL: Newt, this is what Paul Ryan was talking about, being a governing party. He is chairman of the committee. He has a pretty good staff on that committee. He could actually investigate these things. It seems ridiculous for the chairman -- it's one thing for a back bencher on a minority to say I have no recourse, I'm having a press conference, I'm going to go tell people, and scream and yell. He's chairman, he can actually investigate this. Why is he running to the White House?
CHARLES LANE: The standard is not what your average partisan would do. That's not our standard.
GINGRICH: The fact is this whole thing is so over blown. And I think what Nunes was saying to Trump, which the media doesn't want to accept is, that in fact he has some reason to believe they were under surveillance. Now, Trump got pounded on by the media for weeks, and all of the sudden Nunes says, 'Wait a second what if it turns out he was right?' I think he probably was stunned at the idea that after all of this lynch mob mentality in the media, it may well turn out that Donald J. Trump is right and everybody in the establishment is wrong. And I think that's why he went up to see him.
