Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., told "The Ingraham Angle" he is to-date the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Taiwan, and offered suggestions to his successor Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., if she follows through on her plans to travel to the island off China's coast.
LAURA INGRAHAM: Since [1997], it's quite amazing that no House speaker has traveled there. The excuse is always given that China has gotten more aggressive, so we've got to be careful not to provoke them. But what does that say about us?
TAIWAN HOLDS AIR RAID DRILLS AS CHINA DOUBLES DOWN AGAINST NANCY PELOSI VISIT
FORMER HOUSE SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH: We [visited Taiwan] as part of a trip. The Chinese communists had invited us to Shanghai and Beijing. We agreed. Yes, I went with a bipartisan delegation.
One of the points I'd make to Nancy Pelosi is very important: Take a bipartisan delegation. We had 11 members, including [the late Michigan Rep.] John Dingell, who was the senior Democrat at that time.
PELOSI SHOULD GO TO TAIWAN, BE FORCEFUL ON US COMMITMENT: DAN HOFFMAN
And we said to them just before the trip started, "By the way, we're going to go to Taiwan." [The Chinese] were furious. They did everything they're doing right now, they threatened, they bullied, they bluffed. And Gardner Peckham, who was my national security adviser, I remember being near him when [he was] on a phone call with the Chinese ambassador.
And he finally said, "Look, the Chinese communists are not travel guides for the American speaker of the House. If you don't want him to come to China, he'll skip China and go to Taiwan."
US MILITARY NOT WANTING PELOSI TO VISIT TAIWAN
Well, all of a sudden they said, "Well, no, no, no, no." The only condition was we had to go China, Japan and then back to Taiwan. We couldn't go directly from mainland China — because of the Communist Party — directly to Taiwan. The president of Taiwan met with all of us; the bipartisan delegation. They were thrilled that we were there…
I encourage Nancy to go, particularly now that it's public. I think it would be humiliating and destructive if she were to back down.
And I have to say, having a woke Defense Department, that's not how to deal with the American speaker going to Taiwan — makes you wonder what they would do in a real crisis.
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