The Democratic Party yesterday fired its first shot at surging GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich — reviving ethics violations leveled against him when he was House speaker in the 1990s — a sign they now seriously consider him a potential challenger to President Obama.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi dredged up the embarrassing ethics case as Gingrich stumped in Midtown yesterday, meeting with Donald Trump and holding a fund-raiser at the Union League Club.
“One of these days, we’ll have a conversation about Newt Gingrich,” Pelosi, who served on the ethics panel that probed Gingrich’s misdeeds, 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,” Pelosi said, adding, “There’s a thousand pages of this stuff.”
Gingrich was reprimanded and fined $300,000 to settle charges that he used tax-exempt funds for political purposes while teaching a college course.
Gingrich, who has skyrocketed in recent GOP polls to pull ahead of Mitt Romney, said Pelosi’s threat could backfire.
“I want to thank Speaker Pelosi for what I regard as an early Christmas gift,” Gingrich told reporters following a fund-raiser with about 60 donors.
He said unloading unreleased documents from the House ethics panel is a “fundamental violation of the rules of the House.”
“It tells you how capriciously political that committee was when she was on it. It tells you how tainted the outcome was when she was on it.
“I would hope the House immediately condemns her if she uses any material that was gathered when she was on the ethics committee.”
Pelosi, through a spokesman, insisted she would not release privileged information.
But the mere mention of the ethics case stung Gingrich.
“Eighty-three charges were repudiated as false. One mistake we made was a letter written by a lawyer that I didn’t read carefully. That is the only mistake made in the entire process,” he said.
Earlier, Gingrich met with Trump at Trump Tower, where he declared that if he’s the nominee, he’d compete in all 50 states — including deep blue Democratic New York — and beat Obama.
And Gingrich said he’ll push for conservative solutions to fight poverty. He asked Trump to fund an apprenticeship program for poor students — an idea Trump immediately embraced.
Shorter field
First national GOP presidential poll since Herman Cain’s exit:
Newt Gingrich 37%
Mitt Romney 23%
Ron Paul 7%
Michele Bachmann 6%