Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said it is “impossible” that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into President Donald Trump and his officials will be a “fair investigation,” during an interview Monday on “The Laura Ingraham Show.”

Gingrich noted that Mueller and former FBI Director James Comey are longtime friends and expressed his concern that Mueller’s first round of hires for the investigation “were all people who donated to the Democratic Party.” With the mainstream media and the democrats hotly pursuing any evidence that could lead to impeachment proceedings against Trump, Gingrich predicted “a witch hunt” under Mueller.

When Ingraham asked Gingrich if Comey’s and Mueller’s friendship would allow for a “fair investigation,” the former House speaker replied, “I think that is impossible.”

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“This will be a witch hunt. I’ve started to go back and peel back the onion,” Gingrich said.

The former House speaker noted that when Comey served as the deputy attorney general under former President George W. Bush, he appointed special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate then-Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby. Libby was under scrutiny for his part in leaking the covert identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

During the course of the investigation, Libby was indicted on five counts, including obstruction of justice, making false statements, and perjury. State Department official Richard Armitage also was found to have leaked information concerning Plame’s identity.

“Comey, for example, appointed Fitzpatrick to investigate the Valerie Plame case after Comey knew that it was not a crime and knew that in fact Richard Armitage at the State Department had revealed [Plame’s] name and knew that she was fairly well-known around Washington by a number of people,” Gingrich said.

“After [Comey] knew all that, he appointed Fitzpatrick. And Fitzpatrick, of course, told Armitage to shut up,” Gingrich added. “And the country was put in this spectacle during the Bush re-election campaign. But you go back and look at that. Nobody in this city wants to look at history.”

“You look at that and you say to yourself, ‘Comey’s a bad person.’ He kept from the country information he had, I think for the purpose of trying to destroy Dick Cheney,” Gingrich said. “And as you know, Scooter Libby was ultimately caught on what he had said.”

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With regard to Trump, Gingrich warned against the dangers the president will face now that he has said he would be “100 percent” willing to testify under oath about his interactions with Comey, whom he fired.

“I think that in [Trump’s] entire career, he has always counterpunched,” Gingrich said. “And so his automatic instinct — and it’s so deep in him that it’s not something he thinks about. He just does it.”

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Complaining that Trump’s attorneys “have not gotten across to him the difference between the kind of lawsuits Trump has had” and what it entails to be “involved in a potential criminal case,” the former House speaker warned that Trump could trip on his own words.

“Obviously the standards are very different, and as we know from past special counsels, there’s a standard rule in Washington that it’s not the original problem that kills you. It’s the process as they investigate,” Gingrich said.

“For some reason … his attorneys have not been able to get across to him that in a criminal proceeding … environment, every single word matters because they’re going to both measure it against your prior words and they’re going to measure it against everybody else who testifies. And they’re going to measure it against every written document,” Gingrich added.

“And it’s very easy to get yourself in a lot of trouble, even when you’ve done nothing wrong,” Gingrich concluded. “Virtue and innocence are not guarantors of a good outcome in a criminal investigation.”