Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich fired back on Monday to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's suggestion that she could reveal information about him "when the time is right" because she once served on a committee that investigated him for ethics violations.
"First of all, I want to thank Speaker Pelosi for what I regard as an early Christmas gift," he said at a press conference in New York.
"Well, if she suggested that she's going to use material that she developed when she was on the ethics committee, that is a fundamental violation of the rules of the House and I would hope that members would immediately file charges against her the second she does it," he continued. "I think it shows you how capriciously political that committee was when she was on it."
Pelosi told Talking Points Memo that she was very familiar with his record from her time serving on the Ethics Committee investigating him.
"One of these days we'll have a conversation about Newt Gingrich," she said in an interview published Monday. "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."
Drew Hammill, Pelosi's press secretary, tweeted on Monday that she "was clearly referring to the extensive amount of information that is in the public record."
The House voted in 1997 to reprimand Gingrich with an unprecedented $300,000 sanction. Pelosi, however, wanted him to be censured.
Pelosi and Gingrich, who both served as speakers of the House, appeared together in a 2008 ad urging action on climate change. Gingrich recently called the ad "the dumbest single thing I've done in recent years."
This article has been edited to clarify Pelosi's remarks about Gingrich.
