Pelosi and ethics....what a joke...with what she, Reid and Obama have done in the past three years they should all be expelled from office...
Pelosi: I’ll reveal information on Gingrich 'when the time is right'
By Alicia M. Cohn - 12/05/11 02:44 PM ET
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is holding back some information on Republican Newt Gingrich that could detract from his presidential campaign, according to a report published Monday.
“One of these days we’ll have a conversation about Newt Gingrich,” Pelosi told Talking Points Memo. “When the time is right. … 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."
Gingrich, who served as Speaker of the House, worked with Pelosi in Congress from 1987 to 1999. Pelosi also served on the ethics committee that investigated Gingrich for tax cheating and campaign finance violations in the late ’90s.
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.
The ethics investigation of Gingrich took place when Republicans controlled the House. Gringrich resigned from the House in 1998.
Responding to Gingrich's comments, a spokesman for Pelosi said the former Speaker 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.”
A spokesman for the House Ethics Committee declined to comment on "current rules in the context of allegations concerning past conduct, or hypothetical future conduct governed by past rules."
Gingrich filmed an ad with then-House Speaker Pelosi in 2008 to urge action on climate change, which haunted him early in his presidential bid this year. Gingrich called the ad “probably the dumbest single thing I’ve done in recent years” last month.
Republicans in Congress have been slow to rally around Gingrich’s rise to front-runner status in the polls, with former GOP colleague Sen. Tom Coburn (Okla.) stating publicly over the weekend he is not “inclined to be a supporter” of Gingrich due to that past experience.
But Democrats such as the soon-to-retire Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) have suggested Gingrich as the GOP nominee would benefit the Democratic Party.
"He would be the best thing to happen to Democrats since Barry Goldwater," Frank said last week. Goldwater is credited with reviving Republican conservatism in the ’60s.
Pelosi told Talking Points Memo that Frank “spoke for a lot” of Democrats. “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,’ ” she said.
And Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), who also served in Congress with Gingrich and now holds a position of power as assistant minority leader in the House, charged Gingrich on Monday with lacking the temperament to be president.
“He tends to fly off the handle. He will say almost anything in order to get a charge. I’m sure that he’s not serious when he says a lot of these things,” Clyburn said on MSNBC.
It's Amazing that Nancy Pelosi would even mention the word "ethics" with her track record...and that's not to mention all the insider trading it appears she has been involved in while she was in Congress.... She was going to clean out the swamp alright, but first she would have had to look in the mirrow...
Gingrich fires back at Pelosi over threat
By Justin Sink - 12/05/11 02:50 PM ET
Newt Gingrich said that a threat from ex-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to disclose information she learned while serving on an ethics committee investigating him during his time as Speaker of the House would "totally abuse the ethics process" and violate rules of the House of Representatives.
"I want to thank Speaker Pelosi for what I regard as an early Christmas gift," Gingrich said at a press conference in Manhattan Monday.
Gingrich denounced the threat from Pelosi, who is now the minority leader in the House, as "a fundamental violation of the rules of the House," and said that if Pelosi were to disclose details of the investigation, it would expose the "tainted ethics process the House was engaged in." He also called for the House to condemn Pelosi if she were to reveal anything from the ethics probe.
Pelosi told Talking Points Memo that she would reveal damaging material about Gingrich "when the time is right."
“One of these days we’ll have a conversation about Newt Gingrich,” Pelosi said. “When the time is right. … 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."
But responding to Gingrich's comments, a spokesman for Pelosi said the former Speaker 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 served on the ethics committee that sanctioned Gingrich for violating tax law and lying to an investigative panel when he claimed tax-exempt status for a college course he ran for political purposes. Gingrich agreed to a $300,000 fine and admitted that he submitted inaccurate statements to the committee, but maintained Monday that the majority of the charges "were repudiated as false."
Gingrich said that Pelosi's suggestion that she would reveal information from that investigation underscored that the ethics charges were politically motivated.
"It tells you how capriciously political that committee was," Gingrich said.
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