House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said that she knows "a lot" about former House Speaker Newt Gingrich because she served on the ethics committee that investigated him, according to an interview with Talking Points Memo published Monday.
"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 also said she liked Rep. Barney Frank's (D-Mass.) quote on Gingrich. Frank said last week, "I did not think I had lived a good enough life to be rewarded by Newt Gingrich being the Republican nominee."
The ethics committee investigation, Pelosi said, was so sensitive that she once asked her husband to leave the bedroom at 3 a.m. so she could talk privately on the phone.
"He is such a hypocrite," she said of Gingrich in a 1997 San Francisco Chronicle interview after the ethics committee had finished its work on the case. Gingrich was sanctioned $300,000 following the investigation. However, Pelosi wanted him to be censured. "I think if a person loved the House of Representatives, if he loved his party, he would step aside," she said.
Pelosi and Gingrich appeared in a 2008 ad on a sofa in front of the U.S. Capitol calling for action on climate change. Gingrich recently called the ad "the dumbest single thing I've done in years."
Despite the glee of some Democrats to have Gingrich as a top Republican candidate, some Democratic strategists told the Washington Post that he could present challenges to President Barack Obama, because he could energize the conservative base and gain Hispanic support with his extensive outreach organization.
