Newt Gingrich fires back at Nancy Pelosi

Newt Gingrich said Monday that Nancy Pelosi’s threat to discuss what she learned about the former House speaker from a 1990s ethics investigation is “an early Christmas gift.”

He may be right.

Remember that chummy 2008 ad that featured Gingrich and Pelosi urging action on global warming?

“We don’t always see eye-to-eye, do we, Newt?” Pelosi said as the two sat side-by-side on a loveseat overlooking the U.S. Capitol building.

“No,” Gingrich responded. “But we do agree: Our country must take action to address climate change.”

Gingrich recently said it was “probably the dumbest single thing I’ve done in recent years,” to allow himself to be filmed with Pelosi, a liberal icon who was then speaker of the House, as part of a global warming campaign sponsored by former Vice President Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection.

So it’s no wonder that Gingrich was all smiles Monday after Pelosi hinted that she would one day discuss the “thousand pages of his stuff” that she rifled through in the late 1990s while serving on a panel that was investigating Gingrich for tax and ethics violations.

“One of these days we’ll have a conversation about Newt Gingrich,” Pelosi told Talking Points Memo earlier Monday. “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 fired back at a news conference following a meeting with Donald Trump.

“That’s 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 said.

“I want to thank Speaker Pelosi for what I regard as an early Christmas gift,” he said. “…I regard it as a useful education for the American people to see what a tainted political ethics operation Pelosi was engaged in.”

In a response on Twitter, Pelsoi’s office pushed back against the notion that she had threatened to reveal private information from the investigation.

Pelosi “was clearly referring to the extensive amount of information that is in the public record,” wrote Drew Hammill, Pelosi’s press secretary. kim.geiger@latimes.com

Michael A. Memoli contributed to this report.