By MAGGIE HABERMAN | 3/29/12 8:25 PM EDT
Mitt Romney confirmed The Washington Times story late Wednesday that he met secretly with Newt Gingrich over the weekend in New Orleans, via ABC News:
But Romney played down the importance of the meeting between the himself and Gingrich, who earlier this week scaled back his campaign and laid off staffers.
“We’re pretty much in regular communication between the different campaigns and I said hello to Newt,” Romney told Sean Hannity in a radio interview. “Nothing new, nothing exciting except we keep a friendly discourse open.”
A source close to the Gingrich campaign confirmed the meeting happened early on Friday morning at around 6:30 a.m. at Romney’s hotel in the French Quarter district of New Orleans. Gingrich was staying at a hotel about 30 minutes away from Romney’s hotel and met with him before heading to the southern part of Louisiana to campaign in Port Fourchon.
“We do meet from time to time and I’m sure that the Speaker meets with Rick Santorum as well but we don’t go off and report the discussions,” Romney said. “But they are friendly and we discuss the issues, we discuss the way forward but we don’t reveal our secret campaign strategies.”
Gingrich campaign spokesman R.C. Hammond told ABC News that he was not the source of other reports that the two candidates had met, however, “Newt does speak Santorum and Romney on a regular basis.”
That's a rather early meeting. It took place three days before Gingrich announced he was paring down, but not ending, his campaign and said he planned to keep wooing delegates to the Tampa convention.
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