A college newspaper reporter at the University of North Carolina is claiming that an aide to Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign “prompted” the “Secret Service to grab and briefly detain me” because the staffer didn’t like the reporter’s questions.
But Gingrich spokesman R.C. Hammond told The Daily Caller, “The young writer has a better future in fiction that he does in fact.”
In a column posted Monday, Memet Walker of The Daily Tar Heel describes how he tried to interview the former House speaker, and says that an aide stopped him after he asked the presidential candidate about Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes.
According to Walker, an aide to Gingrich immediately jumped in and cancelled the interview: “You’re not asking that. You’re done.”
Walker claims that he prearranged to interview Gingrich with a staffer and did not agree to any “preconditions,” writing, “no topics were off limits.”
“That’s why I was so surprised when, before I had finished asking my first question, that same aide cut the interview short and prompted Secret Service to grab and briefly detain me as the former speaker was led away,” Walker wrote.
But in an interview, Hammond strongly denied Walker’s characterization of the encounter. He said Gingrich merely chose not to respond to questions being shouted by the student after an availability with other members of the press and never walked away from a planned sit-down.
Walker claims he learned a lesson from the interview. “Next time, I’ll just follow my instincts and ask about the moon colony,” the reporter wrote.