"EDITOR’S NOTE: We originally ruled this claim True. A short time later, we were contacted by an attorney who represented Gingrich during the ethics proceeding and who disputed that Gingrich was "fined" by the ethics committee. The lawyer said Gingrich had paid a "cost assessment." We decided to take a second look at the issue and decided to change the ruling to Mostly True."
You neglected to note that the link I posted originally rated the report TRUE. After Newt's lawyer cried like a baby, the rating was changed to MOSTLY TRUE.
Newt's lawyer whined Gingrich was only asked to reimburse the House $300,000 to offset some costs of the Committee’s investigation and that no "fine" was ever levied against Newt.
If you had bothered to actually READ the article before rushing in to White Knight for CDL, you would have read that lawyers with expertise in political law warned against interpreting the levy as merely a reimbursement, saying it’s hard to view it as anything but a penalty against Gingrich.
"I think it is fair to say that the $300,000 was assessed as a punitive measure, and there would have been no such assessment if the ethics committee thought he was free from wrongdoing," Kenneth A. Gross, the head of the political law practice at the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. "It really is matter of characterization and even semantics. It was not a fine in a legal sense but a punitive measure."
"The payment was meant to penalize Gingrich personally for lying to Committee investigators, so it could fairly be called a ‘penalty’ from a layman’s point of view," said Brett Kappel, a counsel with the firm Arent Fox LLP.
Also, the head of the committee that investigated and reprimanded Gingrich said at the time that, although the committee didn’t officially call it a fine, she personally considered it to be a FINE:
Rep. Nancy Johnson, R-Conn: "I see it personally as a FINE."
Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley said it’s FAIR for a media outlet to describe the fee Gingrich paid as a "FINE" or to write that Gingrich was "fined":
"Some people distinguish fines and charges for costs, but the verb 'fine' is also routinely used as including costs. The implication that since the penalty charged Gingrich was not a ‘fine’ there was no imputation of guilt or violation of ethics rules is simply false: People are not held responsible for costs if the charges are found groundless."
http://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2012/feb/07/restore-our-future/did-newt-gingrich-pay-300000-ethics-fine-back-1990/ You really should pick your battles more wisely, CKS. Now go wipe that egg off your face in light of all the brilliant legal minds contradicting Newt's lawyer.