Nancy Pelosi told CNN last night that Newt Gingrich would definitely not become president, whether he was the GOP nominee or not.
“He’s not going to be president of the United States,” Pelosi said. “That’s not going to happen. Let me just make my prediction and stand by it. It isn’t going to happen.”
Asked why she was so certain by CNN host John King, Pelosi said, “There’s something I know,” but did not elaborate on what she was referring to.
Asked about Pelosi’s comments on Fox News this morning, Mitt Romney used the comments as a way to call on Gingrich to ask Congress to release more of the documents related to his ethics investigation.
“I wish I knew what that was,” Romney said about Pelosi’s remark. “I’d tell people what it is right now. That’s one of the reasons why I’m saying that all of the records that were part of the ethics investigation, all of the transcripts, all of the records have to be made public. Not just the final white-washed report, but the full record, the reason that 88 percent of the Republicans in the House voted to reprimand their own speaker, the first time in American history that’s happened.
“We need to understand why that is,” Romney added, “and those records need to be released because you know that if Nancy Pelosi knows those things right now, she will hand them to Barack Obama’s campaign if Speaker Gingrich were our nominee.”
In a Fox News interview after Romney’s this morning, Gingrich addressed the remarks directly, calling on Pelosi to be forthright.
“I think if she knows something, she ought to say it,” the former House speaker said. “If she doesn’t know something, she ought to quit saying it. But this is baloney. I don’t think any Republican is going to be threatened by Nancy Pelosi, and frankly, I’d rather have her threaten me than endorse me, so I feel pretty good about it.”
Asked about Romney’s push for him to call for more of the data related to the ethics investigation to be released, Gingrich pivoted into an attack on Romney.
“This is a guy who has a Swiss bank account . . . has Cayman Island bank accounts,” he said. “He’s never revealed a single thing about his business dealings. And he wants to keep staying on offense about transparency. I would love to have a transparency/accountability debate with Mitt Romney. I don’t think he can answer all sorts of questions that he doesn’t want brought up, including serious liabilities as director of a company.”
“So let’s make it a two-way street,” Gingrich added. “These guys have been throwing punches for weeks. The fact is, they have a lot they can’t answer and won’t answer.”