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.Pelosi probably knows that she can't release info from an ethics investigation without placing herself in legal peril. However, she can put this word out now to prompt more scrutiny from the press and place doubts in the minds of the GOP voters.
“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.
UPDATE: Nancy is backpedaling.
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If an anonymous source wheeled a hand truck stacked with bankers boxes marked “Gingrich Ethics Investigation” into the offices of The New York Times, does anyone honestly believe that the esteemed journalists there would blow a whistle on Pelosi?
This is the same paper that accepted an illegally recorded phone conversation between Newt Gingrich and other House Republicans. The Times received the tapes directly from Democrat Representative Jim McDermott and immediately published a transcript of the conversation in their paper.
Even if Pelosi appears to be backpedaling, I can’t believe that the legality of her threat has anything to do with it. It’s more likely that she received a call from David Axelrod that the card she’s threatening to play is one the Obama campaign would much rather hold onto until later.
When dirt is used early, such as the accusations against Cain, it can whittle the strong candidates from the field completely and the evidence doesn't have to be that strong either. Axelrod effectively removed Obama's main opponent in the 2004 Democratic primary with baseless accusations -but in a primary, the party-loyal voters are easier to shift from one candidate to another within the party.
When George W. Bush was accused of shirking his Air National Guard service in 2004, he was the incumbent candidate and withstood the smear. If the Bush memos had been released when he was an also-ran for the Republican nomination, the voters may have switched to John McCain or Orrin Hatch before the memos were discovered to be forgeries –remember that the media had all but accepted them, but it were bloggers who persisted and uncovered the truth.
Would Cain drop out in the face of his current accusations if he were the Republican nominee and this were September of 2012? I highly doubt it.
The Democrats will use flimsy accusations to eliminate Republican candidates during the primaries. They will use solid accusations backed by evidence to eliminate the Republican nominee. The New York Times won't care where that evidence comes from.
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