Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has admitted that impeaching President Bill Clinton over his relationship with Monica Lewinsky was “a mistake” in a new interview.

Gingrich, a Republican from Georgia, who advocated for impeaching the president in 1998 on charges of lying under oath and obstruction of justice, admitted that the sex scandal “trivialized” the proceedings.

“I think it was a mistake because the real problem wasn’t Lewinsky,” Gingrich told Pod Force One. “The real problem was that he had committed perjury in a case involving sexual harassment while he was governor. In fact, he was stripped of his law license in Arkansas after he left the presidency, and for five years couldn’t practice because he clearly committed a felony.”

Beginning in 1994, then-Attorney General Janet Reno appointed Independent Attorney Ken Starr to lead the Whitewater investigation, a failed real estate investment by the Clintons’ real estate company.

This investigation was later expanded to a larger scope of the president’s life, including the sexual harassment lawsuit that former Arkansas state employee Paula Jones filed against Clinton.

When deposed by her lawyers, Clinton denied having an affair with Lewinsky. Later on, the Starr Report discovered that he lied under oath, sparking House Republicans to call for impeachment, making him only the second U.S. president at the time to face the charges.

“I always argued the question, ‘Is he allowed to commit felonies?’ But by allowing, and this is partly the way the report was written, by allowing it to be about sex, it trivialized it,” Gingrich reflected.

“I realized that we were really off course in August of that year, when I was at the OK Cafe in Atlanta with my two daughters, who at that time were, I guess, in their early 20s, and they both said to me, ‘If our friends lose money on their 401(k) because of some stupid intern, we are going to be mad at you … And I realized at that point I had completely misunderstood how the culture was evolving.”

Clinton had used his law experience to shift the focus of the trial, debating the definition of the word “is” and the semantics of sex.

Despite the attempt to evade, a judge held him in civil contempt for misleading testimony in the Jones lawsuit, suspending his law license for five years. Despite this ruling, he was acquitted by the Senate.

A few weeks prior to the president’s acquittal, Gingrich was removed from the speakership amid frustration over the GOP’s midterm losses diminishing the party’s power and controversy over an ethics issue.

Despite the electoral setback these proceedings caused, Gingrich said one benefit was that Al Gore did not campaign heavily with Clinton before the 2000 election.

“[Clinton] actually left office at the high point of his popularity,” Gingrich said. “I think Gore was actually offended by the whole [saga]; if Gore had understood that and had campaigned more with him, he might have beaten George W. [Bush]. “But he consciously wanted to be a step away from Clinton. And Gore was, frankly, not popular enough to be a step away from Clinton.”

Clinton has been in the news lately for another scandal – he is named repeatedly in the recently released Jeffrey Epstein files.