Newt Gingrich: The left is in a frenzy because Trump represents the end of their world

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich opined that President Donald Trump represented the "end" of the liberal world, which explained why they are so "frenzied" to attack and destroy him. He explained his thoughts to Sean Hannity Tuesday on his Fox News show.

"This effort to silence conservatives, this effort to destroy anybody," Hannity asked Gingrich, "all the collateral damage they can get around the president — what do you make of it all?"

"Look, this is a frenzied, almost a death behavior by the left," Gingrich responded, "because they're in such trouble and Trump potentially represents the end of their world. So you have very powerful institutions, I mean the amount of leaking coming out of the intelligence community is staggering.

"It's all illegal," he said. "People should go to jail. I wrote my newsletter on this last week, and said leakers should be locked up. But it's deeper than that.

"The Washington Post stories are," Gingrich continued, "someday historians are gonna look back on this and say, 'it was one of the funniest periods in American history.' Here you have [former President] Barack Obama who created background techniques for communicating with Iran during his transition. Clearly a sign, because it was Obama, that it was quite clever.

"Now you have the Trump people may have done a parallel thing during the transition," he explained.

Gingrich referred to accusations that Obama had begun communications with Iran in 2008.

Michael Ledeen, a former consultant to the National Security Council and U.S. Defense Department, penned a column at PJ Media stating Obama opened a back-channel to Iran during the 2008 presidential campaign. Ledeen said the back-channel went through retired Ambassador William G. Miller, who also led the 1979 negotiating mission during the Iran hostage crisis. Ledeen wrote that Miller confirmed his back-channel involvement to him.

Gingrich used the example to show the apparent duplicity and double-standard of the mainstream media.

"This notion that suddenly this is a terrible thing," Gingrich continued later about back-channel communications, "it verges on being insane. But this whole story, and I worry — I don't actually worry about the substance. I worry about the investigative process and the degree to which sooner or later somewhere, somebody will engage in a mistake, and that mistake will now become the problem, not the original act, not the original accusation."

Hannity has accused the left of trying to run him off the air because he supports the president by using his controversial reporting of a conspiracy theory involving the murder of a DNC staffer. Meanwhile, investigations into alleged Russian collusion with the Trump campaign before the election continue.