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NewtGingrich.com Is Sending Surfers To Sites And Stories He Wouldn't Like

Looking for Newt Gingrich? Don't type "newtgingrich.com." You might get directed to Freddie Mac, Tiffany's or other sites that bring to mind less flattering stories about the Republican presidential candidate.
FreddieMac.com
Looking for Newt Gingrich? Don't type "newtgingrich.com." You might get directed to Freddie Mac, Tiffany's or other sites that bring to mind less flattering stories about the Republican presidential candidate.

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich's official campaign website — at newt.org — is working fine.

But if anyone types "newtgingrich.com" and hits enter right now, they're not going to see things that the former House speaker would find very funny.

In the last few minutes when we've done that we've been directed to:

-- "Gingrich presidential campaign implodes," a Washington Post story from June.

-- The 2008 video Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi - We can solve it.

-- An Atlantic Wire report from earlier this month headlined "Gingrich's Campaign Still Looks an Awful Lot Like a Book Tour."

-- A "travel guide to Greece," which plays off Gingrich's summer vacation in the Greek Isles.

-- Freddie Mac, the quasi-government mortgage agency that Gingrich did some consulting for — and has been catching grief about from his opponents.

There's talk on Twitter that you might also get directed to Tiffany's website, but that hasn't happened to us yet. Stories earlier this year about the big credit account he and his wife have at the jeweler raised eyebrows.

A WhoIs search for the owner of the domain name newtgingrich.com only tells us it was registered by "Domains by Proxy, Inc." through GoDaddy.com. We'll watch for news about who's behind all this.

At least those folks aren't pointing anyone to a porn site, as happened with "whitehouse.com" for a while.

Update at 1:15 p.m. ET: Over at It's All Politics, our friend Frank James reports that American Bridge 21st Century, a self-styled "progressive research and communications organization committed to holding Republicans accountable for their words and actions," has claimed ownership of the newtgingrich.com site and has it up for sale on CraigsList.

"We're asking for $1 million, but we'd be happy to accept $500,000 in bling. Heck in the spirit of Christmas we might even let it go for $10,000," they say.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Mark Memmott is NPR's supervising senior editor for Standards & Practices. In that role, he's a resource for NPR's journalists – helping them raise the right questions as they do their work and uphold the organization's standards.