Andrew Sullivan for The New York Times

Newt Gingrich said on Wednesday night that his advocacy with state and federal legislators for policies that would help his paying clients was in keeping with his role as a citizen, and was not evidence that he ever acted as a lobbyist.

Speaking in an interview with the Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity, Mr. Gingrich appeared to be referring to an article in The New York Times on Wednesday detailing how he has made millions of dollars while helping his corporate clients promote themselves to — and gain access to — state and federal officials.

He referred to a news briefing mentioned in the article in which he joined with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2005 to promote a bill co-sponsored by Representative Patrick J. Kennedy, Democrat of Rhode Island, and Representative Tim Murphy, Republican of Pennsylvania, that would have increased the use of electronic medical health records.

“You might say to yourself ‘gosh, why would a Newt Gingrich do that?’” he told Mr. Hannity in the interview on Wednesday. “The answer is simple. You want to get a message out in the news media, and you put Gingrich and Hillary together, and Patrick Kennedy with Gingrich, you’re going to get huge press coverage.”

Mr. Gingrich, a former House speaker who has repeatedly said during his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination that he has never acted as a lobbyist, added, “They want to say isn’t that lobbying? No it’s called being a citizen. As a citizen, I’m allowed to have an opinion.”

At the time that Mr. Gingrich was promoting the health records bill, his for-profit Center for Health Transformation had several paying clients that would have benefited from its enactment, including Siemens and Allscripts, a center membership list from the time archived online shows.

In a conference call with investors a year earlier, the Allscripts chief executive Glen Tullman had mentioned the prospect of such a “bipartisan bill” on health records as a contributor to “significant growth opportunities” for his company, a transcript of the call shows.

A Congressional staff member who was involved in the legislation — the 21st Century Health Information Act — said in an interview this week that Mr. Gingrich’s center had provided input as it was drafted, though this person said the center was “engaged at a promoting-the-concepts level,” not in the nitty-gritty of lawmaking.

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And Mr. Gingrich told the Fox News host Bill O’Reilly at the time that he had agreed to do a news briefing with Ms. Clinton to promote the bill after its sponsors told him that “if Hillary and I come to the press conference, they’d get a lot more coverage.” He added in the interview, “So we’re launching a bill.”

During his interview with Mr. Hannity on Wednesday Mr. Gingrich, who had declined to comment for the Times article, said that if he spoke about policies with lawmakers, they knew he was doing so as a policy-oriented thinker speaking from conviction, not because clients were paying him to do it.

Referring to the health records issue Mr. Gingrich said, “I happen to believe if you’re traveling — as you do — and you get into a car wreck or have a stroke or something happens, we ought to be able to instantaneously access a record to know exactly what medicine you’re taking; to be able to provide you a treatment in the emergency room without risking killing you. I believe this very deeply,” he said.

He continued, “If Newt Gingrich believes that, happens to also be working with companies that care about that, and I go walk in to see friends of mine to talk about the issue, they’re responding to what Newt Gingrich believes. Because they know that I don’t go out and say ‘Tell me what you believe in — I’ll be for apples this week if you’ll pay me for apples.’ I walk in and say ‘Look, this is what I believe in.’”