GINGRICH IN HOT WATER

The headaches continue to mount for House Speaker Newt Gingrich. TIME's Viveca Novak reports that documents filed by the Federal Election Commission pose "what could be a grave threat to Gingrich's career, providing the strongest evidence yet that Gingrich may have improperly used GOPAC to support his own political rise and to engineer the eventual Republican takeover of the House. Thousands of pages of damaging tape transcripts, internal memos and other records show that GOPAC was focused on specific national races in the late 1980s and 1990. That is potentially devastating evidence in support of the FEC's charges that GOPAC violated federal election law by attempting to influence federal campaigns without registering as a federal PAC and disclosing its finances." The allegations come at a particularly bad time for the Speaker, says Novak: "He's in the midst of trying to salvage the crown jewel of his Contract with America, the promise of a balanced budget in seven years, and it's increasingly possible that he'll fail. Congress and the White House aren't nearing agreement, and the public is blaming Gingrich and the Congressional Republicans. For Clinton, it wouldn't be so bad for talks to fall apart and for the issues to go to the voters next November; there are strategists at the White House who are pushing for that to occur. But that would probably be a nightmare for Newt."