MR. TIM RUSSERT: Our issues this Sunday: In 1994 he led the Republican revolution, the GOP capturing both houses of Congress for the first time in four decades. What does he think will happen in this year’s midterm elections? And how should his fellow Republicans deal with the government’s phone call database, Iraq, Iran, deficits, immigration, gas prices and more? With us: the former speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich.

Then, insights and analysis from John Harwood of The Wall Street Journal, Jon Meacham of Newsweek magazine, and Judy Woodruff of PBS.

And in our MEET THE PRESS MINUTE, 31 years ago the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, under fire for, yes, domestic surveillance programs.

(Videotape, June 29, 1975):

Mr. WILLIAM E. COLBY: It was improper to collect some of these things, but I think that the word “wrong” covers both the actions which technically may have been illegal and the things that we had no right to do.

(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT: But first, joining us now is the former speaker of the House, Republican Newt Gingrich.

Welcome back.

MR. NEWT GINGRICH: Good to be here.

MR. RUSSERT: Let’s go right to it. This is the headline that greeted our country on Thursday in USA Today: “The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA Today. ... This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews. ... For the customers of these companies, it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made - across town or across the country - to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others. ... The NSA’s domestic program, as described by sources, is far more expansive than what the White House has acknowledged.”

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And this story, Mr. Speaker, led to this cover in Newsweek magazine, coming out tomorrow, a huge telephone receiver over the White House. Your reaction to this development?

MR. GINGRICH: Well, first of all, the amazing thing is—everything that has been done is totally legal. You just look at the, at the specifics of what they’re doing, it is totally legal. The real problem is the Bush administration refuses to come up front and explain it in advance. If you go to the American people and say, “We’re in a long war with the irreconcilable wing of Islam, there are people who want to kill millions of us, your government has to have an ability to track these people down, in the electronic age it has to be real time. Should the Congress guarantee that the United States government is capable of stopping terrorists, detecting terrorists and, if necessary, going back out and finding out who the terrorists worked with, once you know who the terrorists are? I bet this country’s 90 percent in favor of that, as long as there are protections against you as an innocent person having a U.S. attorney use that information for any purpose other than national security.

So, I think this administration, if they would come straight out on this, go right at the, the Senator Leahys of the world and say, “This is the choice. We’re going to have a nuclear weapon some day or a biological weapon that could kill millions of Americans. We have the technical ability to stop it. Now do you want us to be able to stop it or not?”

MR. RUSSERT: On Thursday night you said—told “Hannity & Colmes” it was defending the indefensible.

MR. GINGRICH: Because they refuse to come out front and talk about it. As long as this stuff leaks out and then they’re on defense, then you get these kind of absurd magazine covers and then you’re going to have Senator Specter saying he’s going to threaten American companies. Think about what it does to any company in the United States who would like to cooperate with the U.S. government to be told, “And by the way, you could be subpoenaed by the U.S. Senate and then, by the way, you can have a lawsuit filed,” as they—apparently two lawyers have announced they’re going to file lawsuits. Do you want this country to—and I’m a constitutional conservative. The Congress has to have oversight. Things have to be done in a legal way. But for example, I would split the FBI into two agencies. I’d have a very aggressive anti-terrorist agency and I’d be clear with the entire country and the world.

MR. RUSSERT: But you’re not troubled with the government gathering data on phone calls made in this country by American citizens?

MR. GINGRICH: Look, if you find out one morning that we now have five terrorists in the U.S. who are part of an active network who want to destroy New York City or Buffalo or Atlanta, and the government says, “You know, we could’ve tracked every call they made for the last 10 years, but that would’ve been wrong, Tim. So we don’t know who they’ve been working with. We don’t know what their network is and we can’t stop it,” you’re then going to have a totally new set of congressional hearings by the same people who will then reverse their side, totally. I do think your civil liberties ought to be...(unintelligible). Nobody who’s not involved in terrorism should be at risk. Nobody who’s making normal phone calls should be at risk. But the idea that we’re going to say to the United States government, for libertarian reasons, “We’d rather lose a city than have you gather data,” I think is totally out of touch with the danger of the modern world.

MR. RUSSERT: Back in March you said something that caught my attention on the 2006 election. “What [the Democrats] should do, is say nothing except ‘Had enough?’” Had enough of what?

MR. GINGRICH: Well, first of all, I said that in part because of something that was illustrated on your show last Sunday, which is that if you represent a party whose contract is with San Francisco and Vermont, you can hardly explain what your future is. I mean, Congresswoman Pelosi cannot explain what her speakership would be because it would be so far to the left they would guarantee the Republicans re-election. So I was saying partly they can’t possibly put together a contract with America because Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi and, and, and their allies are so far to the left. They can’t be clear what they would do—raise taxes, create more big bureaucracy, have a much weaker system of defending America. I mean, just go down the list.

Second, I think that it’s clear, whether you look at gasoline prices or you look at the issue of immigration and controlling the borders or you look at the size of spending, that people are—the very people who created the Republican majority are not happy right now with the majority because they really want the values that are essentially conservative. And I think in that sense, Republicans have an obligation to significantly change what they’ve been doing in Congress.

And by the way, I think when Speaker Hastert said the other day that the big spending Senate bill that was $20 billion dollars above the president’s request is dead on arrival and there’s no point on even going to a conference until the Senate passes a new much smaller spending bill, that was a good step towards understanding where the American people want the Republicans to be.

CONTINUED

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