Nancy Pelosi is threatening to spill what she knows about Newt:
Pelosi knows more about Gingrich than perhaps any other major national political figure. She was a senior Democrat when Gingrich was House Speaker, served on the ethics committee that investigated Gingrich for tax cheating and campaign finance violations, and even cut a 2008 ad with him on the importance of addressing global climate change.
But when TPM asked her to talk a bit about his recent ascent and the possibility that he’ll be the GOP nominee, she mostly demurred.
“I like Barney Frank’s quote the best, where he said ‘I never thought I’d live such a good life that I would see Newt Gingrich be the nominee of the Republican party,’” Pelosi said in an exclusive interview Friday. “That quote I think spoke for a lot of us.”
Pelosi didn’t go into detail about Gingrich’s past transgressions, but she tipped her hand. “One of these days we’ll have a conversation about Newt Gingrich,” Pelosi said. “I know a lot about him. I served on the investigative committee that investigated him, four of us locked in a room in an undisclosed location for a year. A thousand pages of his stuff.”
Newt started off joking about it, but then got defensive, accusing Pelosi of threatening to break the House rules:
Gingrich reacted to Pelosi’s comments by thanking her for an “early Christmas gift.”
He also said Pelosi would be violating House rules and abusing the ethics process if she disclosed anything from the ethics investigation.
“That is a fundamental violation of the rules of the House,” Gingrich said in New York following a meeting with Donald Trump. “She’s now prepared to totally abuse the ethics process.”
Releasing the material would show the “tainted ethics process the House was engaged in,” Gingrich said.
But don’t the people have a right to know? Gingrich resigned during this investigation, making the ethics committee’s work null and void. Court records are generally public record, so shouldn’t House ethic investigation records be the same? Why are our elected leaders, earning a living on our money, given such special privileges of privacy, more so than you or me?
Even more interesting is the question of if Pelosi does do this. The House Ethics Committee would be charged with investigating her, but Pelosi has made signals of retiring. So she could do the exact same thing Newt did, leave office and close the case.
Of course if/when this does happen it will be coined by the right as another attack on Newt, but in reality this is what the vetting process should look like. I don’t care what a candidate did in their teens and 20’s, I care what they did in their professional life. This is the President of the United States we are supposed to choose and that information needs to be made available to us so we can decide as informed voters, not as though we were picking out the best singer on American Idol. I believe our country deserves at least that.