ELECTED OFFICIALS NEED TO REEVALUATE JUST WHY THEY WERE SENT TO WASHINGTON ... NOT A SINGLE ONE CAN PASS THE SMELL TEST ... SO WHAT'S NEW!
Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich rebuked House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi for suggesting she would offer details of a 1990s ethics probe against him if he becomes the Republican presidential nominee.
Gingrich, who was reprimanded by the House in 1997 after an ethics investigation, said members of Congress should bring charges against Pelosi, herself a former speaker, if she follows through on airing aspects of the probe.
“I want to thank Speaker Pelosi for what I regard as an early Christmas gift,” said Gingrich, taking questions from reporters in New York after meeting yesterday with real estate developer Donald Trump. “It tells you how capriciously political that committee was that she was on it. It tells you how tainted the outcome was that she was on it.”
Pelosi, a California Democrat, told the website Talking Points Memo Dec. 2 that she relished the possibility that Gingrich, who is rising in the polls, might become the Republican nominee
“One of these days we’ll have a conversation about Newt Gingrich,” she 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.”
She declined to say more, adding, “When the time’s right.”
‘Public Record’
Her spokesman, Nadeam Elshami, said yesterday Pelosi “was clearly referring to the extensive amount of information that is in the public record, including the comprehensive committee report with which the public may not be fully aware.”
Pelosi sat on the panel, equally divided between Democrats and Republicans, that concluded Gingrich used tax-exempt contributions for political purposes and then misled congressional investigators about it. The charges stemmed from a college course Gingrich taught from 1993 to 1995 that was linked to GOPAC, his political action committee, in violation of federal laws barring the use of tax-exempt funds for partisan purposes.
Gingrich, 68, said yesterday he had turned over 1 million pages of material for the investigation, and that most of the charges against him were “repudiated as false.” He said that his “one mistake made was a letter written by a lawyer that I didn’t read carefully.”
