The veteran behind a web video slamming President Obama for politicizing the takeout of Usama bin Laden says that, since the video's release, a number of Navy Seals have contacted him expressing "discontent" with the president's handling of the one-year anniversary of the raid.

Veterans for a Strong America is in the process of evaluating whether they will purchase ad time for the video, which has not yet aired on television.

"What we're doing is we are throwing the penalty flag on President Obama for excessive celebration," the chairman of conservative political action group, Joel Arends, told Fox News host Megyn Kelley in a live interview from South Dakota. "What you've seen from President Obama is he's not only spiked the football, he's signed it, he threw it up in the stands with the fans." (read more)

Fox News has confirmed Newt Gingrich met with Romney campaign manager Matt Rhoades on Monday to talk about how the former House Speaker can assist as a surrogate and fundraiser for the presumptive Republican nominee.

At the meeting, the Romney campaign also offered to connect Gingrich with their network of donors as a way to help retire some of his campaign debts. The March FEC filing shows Gingrich holding $4.3 million in debts at the end of the month, although the campaign emphasizes that half a million has since been paid off and there is a plan in place to pay the rest.

"The Romney campaign will give us access to some of their networks but it will be our responsibility to raise the money," said Gingrich spokesman R.C. Hammond. "While campaigning in support of Romney, the party, and congressional candidates, we will also hold separate events to raise money to pay off debts."

Gingrich will announce the suspension of his presidential campaign on Wednesday at the Hilton in the Ballston neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia.

The face-to-face meeting with Rhoades took place just across the street from the hotel at Gingrich's campaign headquarters. The meeting came after nearly two weeks of talks between the campaigns, including conversations between Gingrich and Romney adviser Ed Gillespie.

At the meeting, Gingrich offered some of his ideas and suggestions to the Romney campaign, especially on the importance of minority outreach. (read more)

On the stump, Newt Gingrich has often credited social media and new technologies with providing low-cost, grassroots ways of keeping his candidacy alive, and his campaign has long sought to cultivate a digital strategy. The main page of Newt’s Network, a virtual community that allows Gingrich supporters to connect with each other, states it was “Paid for by Newt 2012.”

But, mired in $4.3 million of debt, the Gingrich campaign is disputing whether it has to pay for Newt’s Network and officially signaled Friday in its FEC filing that the campaign may never do so – one of three contractual disputes that provide further insight into the extent of the campaign’s money troubles.

Of the debts the Gingrich campaign is disputing in its March FEC report is a $95,000 bill from Moshe Technologies, a small business owned by 34-year-old Moshe Starkman, who officially joined Newt 2012’s field operations team in December along with a handful of other former Herman Cain staffers. (read more)

Newt Gingrich's March FEC report shows the campaign holds $4.3 million dollars in debt and has $1.22 million cash on hand. The campaign raised $1.6 million in March but spent $2.01 million.

The numbers, filed after the network evening shows Friday and first released to Fox, raise questions about whether the campaign can ever pay off all its debts, with Gingrich having failed to notch a win after the Georgia primary. Meanwhile, the candidate has continued his public schedule and his wife Callista has made her own solo campaign trips in recent weeks, racking up major debts in travel and security expenses along the way. Callista is not assigned any Secret Service protection and goes on the road with private security.

At the end of February, the campaign reported that it had $1.55 million in debt, and the significant swell of red ink is a reflection of an internal audit that began in March. From Gingrich's South Carolina primary win all the way through to his loss in Louisiana, Gingrich had an active public schedule involving extensive travel and the paperwork didn't keep up. Sources with inside knowledge of the campaign say the only aspect that has been consistent within Gingrich's operation has been that it is run according to ever-changing guideposts. The candidate is said to have told staffers during the peak of his candidacy that costs shouldn't be a factor when he gave his directives. Projects could be green lighted and then cancelled at whim, with confusing and costly consequences. (read more)

Hours after quitting the presidential race, Rick Santorum sat down with one of his biggest supporters, Dr. James Dobson, to reflect on the day’s events.

“I can't say it was an emotional moment for me,” Santorum said of his announcement in Gettysburg. “I know it was a little tougher for the family, always is tougher for the family."

His wife Karen had also been scheduled to appear at the Lancaster Bible College forum, but Dobson told the audience before Santorum took the stage that "she just didn't feel she had the emotional strength to come" given the turn of events with the campaign and their daughter Bella’s bout with pneumonia.

Standing next to her husband at Gettysburg, Karen had been seen with tears in her eyes.

“When you’re out there in the arena, and the adrenaline is flowing, and you’re getting hit, and you’re hitting back, and sort of going back and forth It's different than being on the sidelines and seeing the people, the person you love being hit. It hurts more,” Santorum said of the campaign’s toll on his family. “And so it was a little tougher for Karen and the kids. They did an amazing job as they always have in standing behind me in every sense of the word." (read more)

The health care consulting firm founded by Newt Gingrich has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and will liquidate its assets, just a year after Gingrich cuts ties with it to run for office.

The Center for Health Transformation filed papers with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Atlanta indicating the think tank holds $1 million-$10 million in liabilities, with assets valued below $100,000.

Gingrich's lawyer, though, said the news has no effect on his candidacy and reflects Gingrich's importance in the company, not a failure of his management skills. Gingrich divested himself of CHT in May 2011 to run for the presidency.

"The secret sauce to Center for Health Transformation was Newt's brain," lawyer Stefan Passantino said.

"This was a for-profit entity bringing together business, thought, and academic leaders to talk about solutions to healthcare," Passantino said. "He built the entity. But it's clear when he left when the room, the interest of all the other leaders of being in that room waned. There was nothing Newt could have done to survive the vacuum he left."

Gingrich's association with CHT first drew national scrutiny for consulting contracts with Freddie Mac, which opponents used to suggest he was a lobbyist in the lead-up to the housing meltdown.

The bankruptcy news comes at a time when his campaign is trying to maintain relevance in the Republican presidential race. (read more)

Frederick, Md. - Newt Gingrich says the finish line for Mitt Romney's path to the GOP nomination is further down the road than what current delegate counts indicate.

The longshot hopeful, who has said he won't get out of the race until Romney secures 1144 delegates, is stressing that the delegates have to be "uncontested" in order to count. The frontrunner's rivals argue some of the states that awarded Romney all of their delegates violated Republican National Committee rules when they moved their contests ahead of April 1 and therefore should distribute delegates proportionally. This dispute, if it continues, would not be ruled on until the August convention in Tampa.

"All the media counts right now give him all of Florida, which is against the rules, all of Arizona, which is against the rules, and all of Idaho," Gingrich said Monday. "Those are all three proportional states and they should only be counting his share. So he has to win 1,144 uncontested delegates."

The audience that had gathered to see him at the auto dealership here in Maryland was loud and enthusiastic, but Gingrich admitted that the odds he'll be the nominee are slim. (read more)

GREEN BAY, Wis. – Just a few days out from the Wisconsin primary, Newt Gingrich and his wife, Callista, officially opened their state headquarters in Green Bay, a hotbed of Republican voters in the state.

But for cynics who think the grand opening is just a shell game of keeping up appearances (recent polls show Gingrich running fourth behind Ron Paul in the state), the campaign would say they’re severely misguided: this office will be open through November, and it’s part of a grand strategy of securing the nomination in Tampa.

While Wisconsin will award delegates mostly in a winner-take-all fashion, there’s opportunity for a non-winner to take delegates if they win a congressional district, and the campaign is hoping to do well in the 3rd Congressional District, which encompasses Callista’s hometown of Whitehall and whose former representative, Steve Gunderson, was her boss when she worked as a staffer on the Hill.

But whatever happens in Tuesday’s primary, state campaign director Robert Lorge says his mission post-primary will be to help Gingrich persuade what he calls  “soft delegates” here in the state to support him: 3 RNC delegates, plus the 3 delegates from each of the eight congressional districts who could become unbound at the convention. (read more)

Denied all immediate avenues to securing the nomination and working with little more than the sheer force of his personality, Newt Gingrich arrived on the campus of Georgetown Tuesday ready to talk about big ideas and take questions from students  – but definitely, it was clear, not from the press.

Whisked in and out of the auditorium by Secret Service, Gingrich effectively dodged the Washington press corp that had gathered in numbers to catch him at his first public appearance since his campaign officially announced it was laying off a third of its already guerilla-sized campaign staff and replacing the campaign manager.

“There are two large principles that led me to decide to run for president,” Gingrich began, in what would be a reiteration of the big ideas address he gave to students at Salisbury University in Maryland the day before. “And it has been an interesting process to try to communicate them and frankly much more difficult than I thought it would be. One was values and the other was innovation.”

He ranted about political leadership: “I would say the greatest frustration I’ve had since leaving the speakership is the denseness of Washington in resisting new ideas.” (read more)

Newt Gingrich is laying off a third of his campaign staff and cutting back on his schedule in an effort designed to sustain the candidate’s long-shot ambitions of winning the nomination at the Republican National Convention, Fox News confirms.

Michael Krull, who took the helm as campaign manager when Gingrich suffered a mass staff exodus in June, has been replaced by deputy campaign manager Vince Haley, a longtime policy adviser to the former House Speaker.

“Michael Krull took over the campaign in June at a moment of great turmoil and helped get us to a point where we were the national frontrunner," wrote communications director Joe DeSantis in a statement. "But Newt and he agreed that it was best for him to step aside for this new phase.”

The staff shakeup, first reported by Politico, is designed around a “big choice convention” strategy, which the campaign says will be built around two goals: showing how Gingrich is the most capable candidate to take on the president and courting delegates in anticipation of a brokered convention.

The reorganization will also involve ramping up the candidate’s online presence and slowing down his travel to a more affordable pace.

In an effort to highlight his “big ideas and positive solutions,” Gingrich will attempt to steer clear of what he has been guilty of doing on the stump – attacking his GOP rivals with exceptional ferocity. (read more)